by James CorbettTheInternationalForecaster.comWe all know by now that the real terrorists (the politicians in the suits and ties and the banksters that pull their strings) are waging their war of terror on multiple fronts for multiple reasons.

Domestically, it rallies the population around the flag, keeping the flock in check. At the same time it justifies the build up of the police state control grid to catch the thought criminals who resist.

It also writes a blank check for the illegal wars of aggression abroad. Simply place your terrorist boogeyman in the square of the chessboard you’re looking to occupy and — hey presto! — you’ve got yourself an excuse to invade. (Even if you “accidentally” end up supporting them, right Uncle Sam?)

But of course the politicians, their string pullers and their fellow travelers benefit from the war of terror in a more straightforward sense. They get to use the terror scares that they themselves create to drum up billions upon billions in the name of fighting the boogeymen.

We’ve all heard of the $640 toilet seat and other ridiculous examples of Pentagon “overspending,” but these stories tend to trivialize the abuses by the military-defense contractors whose entire industry is built on providing overpriced solutions to made up problems. After all, the Pentagon itself just admitted it could cut $2 billion from its budget by shutting down some of the needless bases and defense facilities that have been built around the globe in the name of the American empire.

But $2 billion is chump change.

In the 15 years since 9/11, $1 trillion has been spent building up the police state in the American “homeland” itself.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department has been spending over $600 billion per year maintaining the American military in the post-9/11 era. $4 to $6 trillion of that was spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone, the most expensive wars in US history.

Combined defense spending, including Homeland Security, DoD, State Department, defense related debt interest and other defense costs, has reached the highest levels in modern history over the past decade. From a Cold War era high in the 1980s of $3500 for every man, woman and child in the United States to a 1990s low of $2500, that figure has since breached $4000. Just look at the chart; it isn’t hard to see exactly when the trend reversed and the good times began to flow for the military-industrial contractors: It was 9/11, the birthday of the war of terror and the new era of homeland security.

There are other numbers we could throw in here:

The billions upon billions in military aid sent to the co-perpetrators of the war of terror, including the $38 billion that has been promised Israel over the next 10 years.

But we have to be careful not to fall into the psychopaths’ trap. The real costs of the war of terror cannot be measured in dollars and cents. They are not tallied in a ledger. They are not about money at all.

The real cost is paid in blood. The blood of a million dead Iraqis. The blood of the hundreds of thousands murdered men, women and children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The blood that is being shed right now in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, and in all of the countries that have crossed through the crosshairs of the NATO, American and Israeli terrorists.

It’s measured in the devastation of towns and cities that once bustled with life. In the families torn apart by drone bombings. In the havoc of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes, leave their families and their homeland and their former life behind as everything they knew is torn to shreds.

It’s measured in the blood of the servicemen and women themselves. Lied to, propagandized and indoctrinated their entire lives, given a ticket out of grinding poverty by the military, shot up with experimental vaccines and shoved into the meat grinder for tour of duty after tour of duty. And then, upon returning home, left to rot in rundown hospitals and ignored by the glad-handing politicians and their military-industrial cronies as a suicide epidemic gradually thins their ranks.

This is the true cost of the war of terror, and it is incalculable. And none of it, absolutely none of it, will come to an end until the public stops believing the false narrative of the war of terror and the lies that have brought it about.

Much like Santa Claus and the Easter bunny, the real terrorists can only survive if you believe in them.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS

Just remember everyone of those scumbags you voted for are laughing all the way to the bank!

Barack Obama is most certainly a “domestic enemy” of and traitor to the United States of America and its Constitution and Bill of Rights. He has violated the legitimate powers of the Presidency in instances too numerous to count or list here.

What the Founders knew is that the Constitution was a type of “legal TRUST” (a CONTRACT) created by the various sovereign states, for the people as “individual sovereigns” over the states and the U.S.- which did NOT even yet exist. (And one can NOT make a contract with an entity that does NOT yet exist, in this case, the U.S. government.)

The Preamble to the Constitution makes this fact of the Constitution being a TRUST very clear: “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” But it was the STATES that ratified (signed) this contract as a contractual TRUST among these states.

As any good attorney knows, in ANY legal TRUST (contract), there are 3 parties: the Grantor (the states), the Trustee (the new U.S. government) who administers the Trust strictly according to the specifications within the Trust contract), and the Beneficiaries (the people; “ourselves and our posterity”). Thus the Grantor(s) (states) are the “boss” of the Trustee; and can take legal action against the Trustee on behalf of the Beneficiaries (people) should the Trustee (U.S. government) violate ANY terms of the Trust contract. This is true of any TRUST contract.

“Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following OATH or AFFIRMATION:—’I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”’

Look up the terms “SWEAR”, “OATH”, and “AFFIRMATION” in any good law dictionary (Black’s or Bouvier’s) and you will see that they all mean a CONTRACT. Applicable Maxims of Law (which are considered as absolute TRUTH in Law; thus need NOT be proved in any court) : “In law none is credited unless he is sworn.”; “All the facts must, when established by witnesses, be under oath oraffirmation.”; “There is no stronger bond between men than an oath.”; “They are perjured, who, preserving the words of an oath, deceive the ears of those who receive it.”; “An oath is a contract in law.”

Article I, Section 1: All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Article I, Section 8: Contains a listing of ALL the powers granted to Congress (“enumerated power”); it can exercise ONLY those powers listed. The President can ONLY execute the constitutional statutes passed by Congress – he is given NO powers to issue “Executive Orders”, etc; and therefore NO federal agency (he has authority over all) can issue “regulations” which do NOT conform to the statute and intent of the statute (when passed). Most importantly, any legislated act or statute is NOT true”Law” per se. As the Founders, states and people of that time well understood, all legislated acts or statutes are merely “OFFERS TO CONTRACT” – which the states and people may choose to accept or reject. If accepted by the states and the people, such statutes assume the “FORCE OF LAW” with JURISDICTION over only over the states and people within the states that accepted that statute. (Legislated acts or statutes NEVER become “true Law” – the only “True Law” was – and remains today – the Common Law, which supersedes all legislated statutes — so the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled numerous times, even as recently as 1973.)

“The judgment of a court of record [a court operating under the Common Law only; NO statutes allowed] whose jurisdiction is final, is as conclusive on all the world as the judgment of this court [the U.S. Supreme Court] would be. It is as conclusive on this court [the U.S. Supreme Court] as it is on other courts. It puts an end to inquiry concerning the fact, by deciding it.”U.S. Supreme Court decision in Ex parte Watkins, 3 Pet., at 202-203. [cited by SCHNECKLOTH v. BUSTAMONTE, 412 U.S. 218, 255 (1973)]

The ONLY exceptions where federal statutes are required to be followed are: in Washington, D.C. (which technically IS the “United States”), its Territories and Possessions (then the so-called Northwest Territory), and by employees (agents) of the U.S. government working within the several states. Over Washington, DC and Territories and Possessions, Congress has absolute authority under the Constitution.

During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. One of the many points of contention between Federalists and Anti-Federalists was the Constitution’s lack of a bill of rights that would place specific limits on government power. Federalists argued that the Constitution did NOT need a bill of rights, because the people and the states kept any powers NOT given to the federal government. Anti-Federalists held that a bill of rights was necessary to safeguard individual liberty. Fresh in their minds was the memory of the British violation of civil rights before and during the Revolution. They demanded a “bill of rights” that would spell out the immunities of individual citizens.

Relevant to this discussion are: [see Article 1, Section 8]

Amendment IX: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall NOT be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the PEOPLE.”

Amendment X: “The powers NOT delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the STATES respectively, or to the PEOPLE.”

3.) “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation” (The “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation” (popularly known as the “Constitution Annotated”) contains legal analysis and interpretation of the United States Constitution, based primarily on Supreme Court case law. https://www.congress.gov/constitution-annotated

The latest edition of this book is given for free to EVERY member of Congress; and to the President. Before Congress or the President takes any action or assumes any powers, this book is supposed to act as a “reference” to determine if such actions or powers to be assumed are constitutional.

The authors of the article below miss the point entirely: just about EVERYTHING Barack Obama has done (and many Presidents and Congresses before him) were and are UNCONSTITUTIONAL in that they greatly exceeded the powers (“enumerated powers”) granted in the Constitution AND as the Trustee of the legal TRUST (contract) ratified states for the Beneficiaries (the people).

Obviously, over the last 150 plus years very few members of Congress and Presidents have consulted the Constitution, Bill of Rights or this book, “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation”!

Thank you for reading this brief essay on my web site AND for YOUR COMMENT!!!

If you look in any good LAW dictionary (Black’s 4th Edition or earlier OR Bouvier’s from about 1852 or so), you will find that the words “SHALL” and “MUST” in law actually mean “MAY”. – as in you “may” or “may not” choose to obey a legislated act (statute) or any of its offspring (regulations, by-laws, etc.) And the word “REQUIRE” in law actually means “REQUEST”. A CODE is simply a collection of statutes. (These definitions are left out of more “modern” law dictionaries, for obvious political reasons – but those terms were well understood by the Founders and the people in America and Britain from the early 1600’s until about the 1860’s, changing ever so slowly over time. BUT even the U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued rulings affirming the definitions I presented here!!!! (They are just not covered by the mainstream media.) And they most certainly are NOT taught in American law schools!!!!

In short, you are CORRECT.

As I stated in my brief article, legislated acts (statutes) and their offspring are merely “OFFERS TO CONTRACT”, which (as is true for ALL contracts) one may agree to or not agree to. The “catch” is that the states and U.S. government (especially the courts) make the PRESUMPTION that you have AGREED to their contract (statute), thereby giving them JURISDICTION over you. And the ancient Maxims of Law still applies today: “A presumption NOT rebutted stands as the Truth.” and “Silence is consent.” After I learned all this stuff for my Ph.D. in the political history of British and American law, I NEVER went to go court without submitting to the court a written, notarized AFFIDAVIT (submitted in-person to the Clerk of the Court, who stamps 2 copies – 1 for the judge and my own copy; the Clerk of the Court MUST accept it if you write on it “Submitted on Demand”) rebutting all such presumptions by the court, along with a list of MY definitions to be used in the case. In the affidavit, I give the court seven (7) days to respond – and if it does NOT respond within those 7 days, then BY DEFAULT the court has agreed with me and accepted everything in my affidavit as the truth in the law of the case. Maxims of Law: “An unrebutted affidavit stands as the truth in Law.” and “He, who does not object, consents.”

(It is easy to do: only the first page of the affidavit gets changed in a few places. The rest, such as Maxims of Law, my definitions, etc., stay the same.) The court will almost NEVER respond with a rebuttal of my affidavit within those 7 days, it has AGREED to everything in my affidavit – so it (the state and the judge) have LOST by default. IF I decide to appear in court (which is almost NEVER), I have a notarized, stamped-by-the-Court-Clerk, copy of this affidavit. The judge can NOT ignore it, for he will be subject to criminal and civil actions if he does so. Further, I can turn this affidavit into an “International Commercial Lien” (explained in another article on my web site) thereby “freezing” ALL his current and future assets for 99 years (or forever if I place it in a trust). And if I register this Lien with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it becomes a “negotiable instrument” which I can sell to any investor, investment bank, etc. Since my Liens are typically for $50 Million and a buyer will usually offer between 1-2% of this nominal value, that means I just made $500,000 to $1 Million tax-free dollars. And NO COURT in the world can over-turn this Lien, since it is created by a non-judicial process in which there was NO controversy (recall that, by not responding with his own “notarized affidavit of rebuttal”, the judge has ALREADY AGREED with everything in my original affidavit) – and where there is NO controversy, NO court may assume jurisdiction!!! And if one does appear in court, let your DOCUMENTS do all the “talking” – NEVER say anything more! If pressed by the judge to “explain” something, just say, “It is ALL explained in the documents submitted, so I have absolutely nothing to add.” And do NOT swear any OATH in court, since that negates your documents and gives the judge jurisdiction over you. Remember the Maxim of Law, “An oath is a contract in law.” And at this point, you do NOT want to create a new contract with the court by swearing an oath!

Do NOT expect lawyers (except for International Commercial Lien specialists) or lower-court judges to know this stuff, since it is never taught in U.S. law schools. But a judge on the Appeals Court level will often know about it; and most definitely a judge on a state or federal supreme court. Lastly, if ANYONE tries to interfere with this Lien, that person may be easily added to the Lien by simply writing his name, title, address and brief description of what he did onto the back of the Lien – so ALL his assets get “frozen” also and he then also owes me $50 Million!!!

One can “beat the system” IF one knows the system – and then use the system against “the powers that be”. I have used “International Commercial Liens” on 6 people (all U.S. officials); and won EVERY time! (This is in another article on this web site about “DONUTS, etc”.) And I NEVER paid for any out-of-state traffic ticket, parking ticket, etc – only those in Massachusetts because my drivers license was a CONTRACT with the state.

By the way, I now live most of the year in Ukraine or Crimea – so I no longer have to deal with courts in the U.S.

Best wishes!

JHH

Extra Stuff:

After the ratification of the original (“organic”) “The Constitution for the united States of America”, written in plain English for all to understand, the courts, Congress and people accepted as FACTS OF LAW that the people as individuals were the sovereigns of the Union states, the various states were viewed as separate “foreign countries with respect to each other and with respect the United States”; and most almost all legislated acts (statutes; from which regulations were written) applied ONLY to employees and agents of the U.S. government. The Congress had jurisdiction only over Washington City, as the seat of the federal government, federal Territories, federal forts and naval stations within a state; and federal buildings within a state, usually federal Post offices. Federal statutes applied to people living in one of the sovereign states ONLY if that individual man CONSENTED to that particular statute. The federal courts existed solely to settle disputes between states; and disputes between people from two different states.

..at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…with none to govern but themselves….. [CHISHOLM v. GEORGIA (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @DALL (1793) pp471-472.]

“There is no such thing as a power of inherent sovereignty in the government of the United States …. In this country sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution entrusted to it: All else is withheld.” — Julliard v. Greenman, 110 U.S. 421..

The people of this State, as the successors of its former sovereign, are entitled to all the rights which formerly belonged to the King by his prerogative. [Lansing v. Smith, 4 Wend. 9 (N.Y.) (1829), 21 Am.Dec. 89 10C Const. Law Sec. 298; 18 C Em.Dom. Sec. 3, 228; 37 C Nav.Wat. Sec. 219; Nuls Sec. 167; 48 C Wharves Sec. 3, 7.]

“It will be admitted on all hands that with the exception of the powers granted to the states and the federal government, through the Constitutions, the people of the several states are unconditionally sovereign within their respective states.“ ~ Ohio L. Ins. & T. Co. v. Debolt, 16 How. 416, 14 L.Ed. 997 (1854)

“Our government is founded upon compact [contract]. Sovereignty was, and is, in the people“ — Glass v. Sloop Betsey, U.S. Supreme Court, 1794.

Even Alexander Hamilton (1st Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington) and one of the most ardent advocates for a strong central government wrote, “Necessity and expediency are NOT legitimate excuses for violating the Constitution you swore to uphold and protect – even during a ‘crisis’“.

“The Constitution for the united States of America”, written in plain English for all to understand, the courts, Congress and people accepted as FACTS OF LAW that the people as individuals were the sovereigns of the Union states, “the various states are separate foreign countries with respect to each other and with respect the United States” (from various U.S. Supreme Court rulings)

Three years ago today, Barack Obama gave a major counterterrorism address at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C. It was what his aides call a “framing” speech, an effort to knit together an overarching approach to the fight against radical terrorists. Predictably, Obama touted his administration’s key successes. Osama bin Laden was dead, the core al-Qaida organization in Pakistan was “on a path to defeat,” and there had been no “large-scale” terror attacks on U.S. soil since he had taken office.

And he stoutly defended some his own most controversial actions, such as the incineration-by-drone of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born preacher and chief of external operations for the Yemeni offshoot of al-Qaida. “His citizenship should no more serve as a shield than a sniper shooting down on an innocent crowd should be protected by a SWAT team,” Obama averred.

But the speech, many months in the works, was also an unusual public expression of Obama’s private angst about the American killing machine he had built and was now presiding over. He hadn’t run for office so that he could “go around blowing things up,” he’d told his national security team, according to an account in the New Yorker.

He gave his audience an extraordinary glimpse into how he weighs the tradeoffs between security, morality and law, confessing his own personal anguish upon learning that strikes he had ordered killed civilians. (“For me, and those in my chain of command, those deaths will haunt us for as long as we live,” he said.)

He rededicated himself to closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, an effort that had collapsed amid congressional obstruction, political realities and Obama’s own laconic approach toward Congress.

Most strikingly, Obama mused openly for the first time in his presidency about how to move the country off a perpetual wartime footing. “This war, like all wars, must end,” Obama said. “That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.”

To that purpose, he announced a series of new polices (a Presidential Policy Guidance in the bureaucratic vernacular) that would narrow the scope of the American struggle against terrorism, create more stringent rules for the use of lethal force and generally impose more accountability and transparency on a killing process that had operated almost entirely in the shadows.

Obama issued directives reining in the use of drones outside conventional battlefields and tightening the criteria for targeted killings. To circumscribe what many critics saw as a war that had become boundless in time and geography, Obama vowed to work with Congress to “refine and ultimately repeal” the Authorization for Use of Military force, the Congressional writ that gave the American president sweeping powers in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

And he urged a more nuanced approach to identifying those terrorist groups that required a military response from the United States. Not every band of extremists involved in local insurgencies poses a threat to our national existence or way of life, he suggested.

Obama located the country at a crossroads and declared that it was time to “define the nature and scope of the struggle, or it will define us.” Implicitly, he was saying that we had to regain our perspective and not overreact to a threat that was actually receding. For 12 years politicians and security officials had warned against a pre-9/11 mentality of complacency. Obama was pointing out the complementary danger of being stuck in a post-9/11 mindset of overreaction to a threat that seemed to be receding.

But now the battlefield assessments are more dire and the threat is metastasizing. A raging civil war in Syria paved the way for the emergence of ISIS, which captured huge swaths of territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate. The group shocked the world by beheading American and other Western hostages. It demonstrated an ability to pull off large-scale attacks in the heart of Europe and to inspire plots like the one in San Bernardino, Calif., that left 14 dead. Fear of Islamist terrorism was spiking in American cities and pulsating through the 2016 presidential campaign.

Talk of winding down the terror wars has been dropped from the Obama administration’s message. Instead, the administration has been pouring thousands of new troops back into the Middle East, and his aides were looking for a new vocabulary to describe a strategy that more closely resembled the approach of the previous decade than the forward-looking agenda Obama had laid out at Fort McNair.

Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser and close adviser to Obama, described a hybrid strategy comprising many elements, which together do not add up to a traditional war. “We have a variety of different tools that we use that range from a drone strike to an airstrike to a training exercise to law enforcement cooperation to try to deal with that terrorist threat,” Rhodes said in an interview. Likening the strategy to “Plan Colombia,” the 1990s-era U.S. initiative to combat Colombian drug cartels and leftist insurgents, Rhodes said that the U.S. has assumed “a counterterrorism posture that resembles less a war than a mix of counterterrorism efforts and military support to countries that are dealing with fractured states and civil conflicts.”

But the reality is that a president whose ambition had been to wind down and ultimately end the wars of 9/11 has found it hard to resist the inexorable momentum toward more military engagement.

Obama has been accused in the past of failing to follow up his lofty rhetoric with resolute action, of attempting to bend the arc of history with mere eloquence. The truth is more complicated. Circumstances have changed, making some promises harder to fulfill. In some areas progress has been made, but it is often slow and plodding. We are not reverting back to a post-9/11 formula, occupying countries with large standing armies and twisting our foreign policy to fit that paradigm.

In the twilight of his presidency, it’s reasonable to start asking what Obama’s record on terrorism will look like when he departs — and what he will leave behind to his successor, both in terms of the nature of the terror threat and the tools available to deal with it. What follows is an assessment of Obama’s accomplishments and where he’s fallen short, measured by the yardstick of his own words.

Even before he became president, Obama had identified drones as his go-to weapon. During the transition, he and John Brennan, soon to be his counterterrorism adviser and later director of the CIA, agreed that the surgical capabilities of drones served Obama’s larger strategic goals in the fight against terrorism: taking the bad guys off the battlefield and thwarting attacks, while shrinking America’s footprint in the region. Likening terrorism to a cancer, Brennan said “you need to target the metastasizing disease without destroying the surrounding tissue.” The weapon of choice: armed pilotless aircraft, or drones

But Obama’s very first experience with a drone strike rattled him. Four days into his presidency, the CIA was targeting al-Qaida and Taliban commanders in South Waziristan along the Afghan-Pakistan border. But the strike went badly awry, killing an innocent tribal elder and several members of his family.

It was the start of a pattern that has run through his entire presidency. Intellectually, Obama was able to make an ironclad case for the utility of drones, from both a moral and tactical standpoint. As commander in chief he could not stand by idly when the intelligence indicated terrorists were plotting to kill Americans. The precision of drones, he was convinced, would minimize civilian casualties compared to conventional airstrikes or ground combat, without risking American lives. And yet deadly mistakes continued, innocents were killed, and Obama always seemed to have a nagging feeling that he couldn’t fully control this controversial program that was so closely identified with him personally.

The deadly efficiency of the program made it hard to resist. During the first couple of years of the administration, the Obama White House sometimes seemed almost giddy about the CIA’s successes. Rahm Emanuel, the president’s first chief of staff, was the program’s biggest cheerleader, regularly calling then-CIA Director Leon Panetta to congratulate him for major strikes. He even urged the agency to tout its successes in the media by leaking colorful details of the covert hits to friendly reporters.

But ironically, one of the strikes that Emanuel celebrated was also a turning point for the program. Baitullah Mehsud was a senior leader of the Pakistani Taliban and one of the most bloodthirsty terrorists on the CIA’s kill list. In the summer of 2009, agency spotters had Mehsud in their sights. But they couldn’t guarantee a clean shot. He would likely be surrounded by civilians. With the White House’s blessing, the strike was made. Mehsud was killed, but so was his wife, who was massaging his legs at the time.

The strike was viewed by its “operators” as a major victory in the war on terror. But the unintended casualties gave pause to some in the White House, including Obama. In the aftermath of the Baitullah strike and others that had gone badly, the program was put through a “hot washing,” according to a knowledgeable source, using a military term for a rigorous performance review.

Other factors heightened concerns over the targeted killing program. The Pakistani government, a critical ally in the war against al-Qaida, was threatening to withdraw cooperation because the strikes were so unpopular there. The American ambassador in Pakistan, backed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, called for scaling back the program and requested more input in authorizing the strikes.

In response, the White House began developing standards for drone strikes outside conventional battlefields. Obama wanted to institutionalize rules for using these deadly weapons, both for his administration and for future presidents. The new standards could also serve as a blueprint for international norms for drone warfare as the technology became available to other armies.

The project, informally called the “playbook” and run by Brennan, resulted in a Presidential Planning Guidance, which Obama announced at the Fort McNair speech. It was an effort to make sure “we had a rigorous process for figuring out who was worth taking a shot at,” said a one senior Obama adviser.

The PPG, a classified document, limits drone strikes to human targets who cannot be captured and who pose a “continuing imminent threat” to Americans. Moreover, under the policy guidance, such drone strikes can only be authorized when there is “near certainty” that no civilians will be killed. (The imminence standard has been criticized by human rights lawyers because of the administration’s elastic definition of imminence. Obama officials have argued that that it would be too late to take action once terrorists were executing an operation.)

Obama also proposed in the PPG new mechanisms for increasing oversight of drone operations outside of war zones. He pledged to work with Congress to develop a special court that would evaluate “lethal action,” although he warned that bringing the judiciary into the process might pose constitutional problems. He also raised the possibility of establishing an “independent oversight board” within the executive branch to oversee drone strikes.

One key reform he did not announce at the National Defense University speech, but rather set in motion secretly, was shifting drone operations away from the CIA to the Pentagon, which is subject to more accountability and transparency.

Three years later, how well has Obama lived up to these goals? It’s a mixed picture, although some progress has clearly been made.

Since 2013, the number of drone strikes outside of conventional war zones has fallen dramatically. At the peak in 2010, there were more than 122 fired in Pakistan, according to the New America foundation. In 2013 there were 26; in 2014 there were 22; and so far this year there have only been 2. Less drastic, but still substantial, decreases have also occurred in Yemen and in Somalia.

This is partly due to changing circumstances; in Pakistan, after a decade of pounding al-Qaida and the Taliban, there are very few targets left to hit. “They are either dead, have left the region, or are so burrowed in they can’t be targeted,” said one former intelligence official with deep knowledge of the drone program. But just on Saturday, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, was targeted by a drone strike along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, according to the Afghan government, killed along with an associate.

What impact the more rigorous standards imposed on the drone program by the PPG have had on the pace and efficacy of targeted killings is less clear. For one thing those standards do not apply in Pakistan at this point.

Obama’s pledge to consider a secret court or an independent board to oversee the drone program has gone nowhere. Both of those options, according to a senior administration official, have been shelved.

Moving the program from the CIA to the Defense Department has proven to be slow and difficult. The agency, unsurprisingly, resisted giving up a program that was a boon to its reputation. But a bigger obstacle was the intense turf war waged out of public view between the congressional oversight committees for intelligence and defense. “The intel committees fought viciously to keep the program,” said one top administration official.

Moreover, real questions emerged about whether the Pentagon had the technical know-how to take over exclusive control over the drone program. In 2014 a Defense Department drone strike in Southern Yemen accidentally killed a number of civilians attending a wedding party, provoking a debate within the government about the wisdom of turning the program over to the military. The CIA seized on the accident to argue for keeping a major role in choosing targets.

There is some evidence that the military has assumed command of the program in at least one theater of war. Lately, the Defense Department has been willing to publicly take credit for drone strikes in Yemen. When both the CIA and Yemen were operating parallel programs there, the military could not reveal its operations, because on those occasions when it did not take the shot, keeping silent would have implicitly exposed the CIA’s role. A senior administration official predicted to Yahoo News in a recent interview that by the time Obama leaves office, the program will have fully shifted over to the military, with the exception of operations in Pakistan. That’s because the Pakistani government will only allow the U.S. to operate there covertly, which only the CIA can do. Elsewhere, the CIA, with its unique expertise, will continue to gather and analyze the intelligence needed to target terrorists. The military will track the bad guys and then pull the trigger.

Administration officials cite the drone killing of Junaid Hussain, a top ISIS propagandist and computer hacker, as a model for the kind of “dual command” structure that could be used going forward. Barack Obama shed no tears over that operation.

The world was different enough in May 2013 that Obama could plausibly promise that he would try “to refine, and ultimately repeal” the 2001 legislation that set the stage for the invasion of Afghanistan and the global war against al-Qaida. He could tell Americans that, with some work at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, “we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.” His administration later called for repealing the October 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force that gave George W. Bush the green light to invade Iraq — a step loaded with significance for Obama, who built his history-making 2008 campaign on a vow to disentangle a weary America from the Middle East.

Top Obama aides and their allies in Congress now acknowledge that the job of rewriting the legislation that underpins the war on terrorism will almost certainly fall to the next administration. “I do think any future president is going to need to figure this out,” Rhodes told Yahoo News.

Obama has now spent more time at war than any other U.S. president. His unwillingness to use force is frequently exaggerated both by aides eager to portray him as the solution to Bush-era problems and by critics eager to cast him as a weak defender of U.S. national interests. In 2008, he promised to kill bin Laden if he got the chance — even if the terrorist mastermind were on sovereign Pakistani soil. In May 2011, he kept that promise. In his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Obama talked of constraining war but bluntly vowed: “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” He became the first American president known to have targeted an individual American citizen, al-Awlaki, for assassination. His decision not to strike Syria in 2013 has drawn sharp criticism, but many of his fiercest critics (and the U.S. public) also opposed using force at the time. He hurled U.S. forces into combat in Libya without congressional authorization (and without a plan for filling the vacuum left by Moammar Gadhafi). And in his 2015 campaign to sell his nuclear agreement with Iran, Obama freely boasted of ordering the use of deadly force in at least seven countries — overtly, covertly, deploying troops, ordering drone strikes, acting with or without congressional authority, with allies or unilaterally, and sometimes in ways that test the bounds of international law.

At the time of the National Defense University speech, White House aides thought they saw a window for curtailing executive war-making authority under the 2001 AUMF. Congress, in this scenario, would take a more assertive role in defining the proper means and the ends before young Americans charge into battle. Obama’s team also contended that the 2001 measure, designed to target al-Qaida, was increasingly out of date — an argument they still make.

“You could foresee a scenario in several years where al-Qaida, the organization that launched the 9-11 attacks and which we created an AUMF for, really doesn’t exist anymore; it’s fully out of business,” Rhodes said.

“So are you still using an authority crafted for an organization based in Afghanistan in 2001 to fight an organization that’s based in Somalia and Mali and Yemen in 2019? To us that, at a certain point, becomes unsustainable,” Rhodes said.

In February 2015, Obama sent Congress a new AUMF, explicitly authorizing his undeclared but escalating military campaign against ISIS (or, to the administration, ISIL) and pressed Congress to start the work of refining, and repealing, the 2001 law.

But the new measure has stalled, perhaps for good. While the administration could still send Congress proposed changes to the 2001 AUMF, the White House insists a new measure, aimed at ISIS, has to be in place before it can risk losing the authority it claims to have under the older resolution.

“We do believe that we still need to have the authority to degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL, and, where necessary, continue to apply pressure to al-Qaida affiliates around the globe,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said in April.

But “I can’t really conceive of rolling back [the 2001 AUMF] unless we have a replacement, whatever it looks like, on the books,” a former career national security official who used to advise Obama told Yahoo News on condition of anonymity.

For Rhodes, this president or a successor will have to embrace a new legal framework.

“I think it will become increasingly unsustainable to be relying on an authority crafted for a place and time, an organization that really doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Either way, the United States seems set to remain on the “perpetual wartime footing” that Obama declared he wanted to end.

When Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo detention center on his third day in office, there were 241 detainees at the facility, down from a total of about 800 when George W. Bush opened the prison after 9/11. By early 2013, the start of his second term, that number had dropped by only about a third, to 166.

As of this February, it was down to 91, and today there are 80 detainees remaining at the prison. That number will decrease even more over the next few months. But when Obama leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017, Gitmo, as it is known, will almost certainly still be open for business, leaving one of the president’s signature campaign promises unfulfilled.

There is plenty of blame to go around for this. Early in Obama’s first term, efforts to shutter Guantanamo were overwhelmed by the politics of terrorism.

In May 2009, Democratic House Appropriations Committee Chairman Dave Obey stripped $80 million that Obama had requested to close the prison from an emergency funding bill. “While I don’t mind defending a concrete program, I’m not much interested in wasting my energy defending a theoretical program,” Obey said at the time. “So when they have a plan, they’re welcome to come back and talk to us about it.“

Republican hardliners (with not a few Democrats going along) seized on the issue to try to make Obama look weak on national security. The Obama administration provided all the ammo Republicans needed with its clumsy and ill-fated plan to transfer a handful of forlorn Chinese Uighur prisoners to a Northern Virginia suburb, touching off a full-blown NIMBY (not in my backyard) rebellion in Congress.

The Obama team members seriously underestimated how difficult a task they had assigned to themselves. “There was kind of this naiveté that somehow, if the president said we’re going to close Guantanamo, and we have a plan to close Guantanamo, that ultimately that would happen,” recalled former CIA Director Panetta.

Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department official tasked with determining which prisoners could be transferred from Gitmo and which were too dangerous to release or send to trial, learned this at his first White House meeting on the matter. When he remarked in a Situation Room meeting that this would be an arduous process, a senior White House official impatiently responded: “What’s so hard? Just do one and then multiply by 240.”

Panetta also lays some of the blame directly at the president’s feet for not personally (and relentlessly) engaging Congress on the Gitmo issue. It’s important to remember that early in his presidency, Obama had to hoard his political capital for dealing with the economic crisis while moving ahead with health care reform. Nevertheless, according to Panetta, Obama was unwilling to do the hard, often frustrating, work of engaging Congress to bring it along. “Sometimes he is offended when the political process doesn’t keep up with what he’s trying to do,” Panetta observed in a recent interview, adding that he often urged Obama to invite key members of Congress to the White House for briefings or cocktails, but the president resisted. “In the end you have to be able to engage in that process to be able to build . . . their support for the things you’re trying to do in protecting the country.”

Toward the end of Obama’s first term, the GOP-led Congress had passed legislation barring the use of congressionally appropriated funds to transfer detainees to the U.S. homeland. That meant the 48 detainees that the Obama administration had determined could not be prosecuted for legal reasons and were too dangerous to transfer to other countries or release were stuck at Gitmo. And so was Obama’s policy. He seemed to have given up. He didn’t even have a single official at the White House or any of the relevant agencies assigned to lead the flagging project.

In the spring of 2013, around the time of Obama’s Fort McNair speech, the majority of detainees, more than 100, went on a hunger strike, and as many as 45 had to be force-fed. Gitmo seemed to tug once again at Obama’s conscience. He reinvigorated the effort to get it closed, appointing special representatives at both the State and Defense departments and personally dug into the bureaucracy to prod the time-servers and foot-draggers. The administration accelerated the pace of transfers in a meaningful way, including the use of Periodic Review Boards (PRBs), which allowed the 48 prisoners being held indefinitely to challenge their detention.

This February the administration announced a new plan to close the facility. The problem is, it depends on the Republican-led Congress lifting its ban on transfers to the homeland, something few expect will happen.

Administration officials talk about a “Plan B” should their public plan fail. Some have hinted at the possibility of Obama taking executive action to overcome the congressional ban on transfers to the U.S. While administration allies have argued that choosing where to house detainees captured in a war setting is a “tactical” military decision within the constitutional powers of the commander in chief, many in Congress would view such a move as a naked power grab. It would likely invite comparisons to the controversial legal opinions developed during the Bush administration to justify the use of torture and illegal surveillance. “Obama’s arguments for disregarding the Gitmo restrictions is the same argument the Bush administration used to avoid the torture ban; namely, that Congress cannot restrict the president’s “tactical” decisions as commander in chief,” says Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and the Justice Department official who withdrew the Bush administration’s opinions on torture and surveillance.

There are creative solutions to solving the Gitmo riddle, including one being circulated by Ken Gude, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, who is close to the Obama administration. Under the plan, the administration would continue moving out those who could be transferred, designate a handful of detainees who have violated the laws of other nations for third-party prosecutions and accelerate the Periodic Review Board process. That would still leave about 32 detainees in the camp, including 22 low-level members of al-Qaida and the Taliban. But Gude has a plan for them. He argues that they are no different from the al-Qaida and Taliban foot soldiers whom the U.S. military imprisoned on its base in Bagram, Afghanistan. Once we relinquished Bagram to the Afghans, we turned over those detainees to the sovereign Afghan government. There is no substantive difference between the Bagram prisoners and those being held at Gitmo, Gude argues, so we should turn over those being held at Gitmo to the Afghans. Gude says this would leave only the handful of detainees who are awaiting prosecution in the military justice system, effectively turning Guantanamo into a trial venue rather than a prison camp.

But even Gude sees the scenario as a long shot. Perhaps the administration’s best bet for seeing the camp shuttered is the election of Hillary Clinton as president. As Obama’s secretary of state, Clinton pushed repeatedly for aggressive action to close the military prison. As she was leaving office, she even sent a sharply worded memo the White House chiding Obama’s advisers for failing to do so

For his part, Donald Trump has said he would keep Guantanamo open and “load it up with some bad dudes.” Oh, and he also says he would get Cuba to pay for it.

“After nearly nine years, our war in Iraq ends this month.” That was Obama’s confident message on Dec. 12, 2011, as he proclaimed the fulfillment of his defining 2008 campaign promise to bring American forces home.

Roughly 4 1/2 years later, the president is on track to hand his successor an undeclared but open-ended and escalating war against the Islamic State, with some 5,000 Americans in harm’s way in Iraq and about 500 U.S. special operators in the slaughterhouse that is Syria.

It will be up to the next commander-in-chief to fulfill Obama’s promise to “degrade and destroy” ISIS. Someone will inherit a whole new “our war in Iraq,” as well as the catastrophic Syrian civil war.

Through it all, he has been dogged by criticisms that he was caught flat-footed by the rise of the terrorist group.

“It struck me that I did not see anything that indicated that there was concern about ISIS developing,” Panetta, who served Obama as defense secretary until February 2013, told Yahoo News. “At least from my perspective, it sounds like that somehow the ball was dropped.”

Obama aides dispute that they ever lost track of the threat posed by ISIS, which grew out of al-Qaida in Iraq, formally renamed itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in April 2013, and proclaimed its caliphate in June 2014.

“I did not believe that there was an intelligence failure as it relates to the fact that al-Qaida in Iraq was moving over the border to Syria and they were morphing into something quite dangerous,” Rhodes told Yahoo News. On the other hand, he added, “We did not anticipate, and really I don’t think anybody did, the extent to which the Iraqi security forces would collapse in the face of that. There was no warning of that.”

However, some of Obama’s sharpest critics have directly tied the deadly chaos that fed the rise of ISIS to the president’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq in late 2011.

Obama launched his war against ISIS one month before McCain and Graham’s column. As of April 15, this year, the total cost of military operations was about $7.2 billion, with a daily bill of $11.7 million, according to the Defense Department. As of April 12, the United States and its coalition partners had conducted a total 11,539 strikes — 7,794 in Iraq and 3,745 in Syria. The United States accounted for 8,825 of those in Iraq and 3,518 in Syria. There have been three U.S. combat casualties.

The White House insists that American forces don’t have a combat mission and has ruled out “enduring offensive ground combat operations,” a description that chief Obama spokesman Josh Earnest once described as “intentionally” fuzzy. Asked recently at what point in time American special operators sent to Syria late last year would meet the definition, Earnest suggested that they never would because their numbers are far short of the tens of thousands who invaded Iraq in March 2003.

The war on ISIS has largely proceeded on three fronts: Retaking territory the group captured in Iraq and Syria, preventing terrorist attacks either inspired or directed by the Islamic State against the United States and U.S. allies and taking aim at the group’s adherents and allies in other countries, like Libya.

As for the “destroy” part of “degrade and destroy,” top Obama aides can sketch out the contours of the victory they hope their successor will achieve.

“What it looks like is, do they [ISIS] have a safe haven from which they can plot, free of pressure, or free of enough pressure, so that they can plot, plan, and execute” attacks against the United States, Obama’s homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco, told Yahoo News in a recent interview.

Asked how he would define victory against ISIS, Rhodes told Yahoo News: “I would define it as ISIL no longer being able to control territory from which it can project terrorist attacks against the United States, our allies and partners.”

Victory won’t be “eradicating every ISIL sympathizer and member off the face of the earth,” Rhodes said.

The night of the 9/11 attacks, with the rubble of the World Trade Center and a shattered side of the Pentagon still smoldering, then-President George W. Bush declared a “war against terrorism.” Two weeks later, he promised that “our cause is just and our ultimate victory is assured.”

Bush’s rhetoric is mostly remembered now for decisive statements like those. He came to regret some of them — like saying he wanted Osama bin Laden “dead or alive,” declaring victory in Iraq in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner, or using the religiously loaded word “crusade” to describe the global conflict against terrorists.

But arguably more important was a moment when his trademark certainty wavered. Asked in an August 2004 interview with NBC’s Today Show whether the United States could ever win the global war on terrorism that he had declared after the 9/11 attacks, Bush replied: “I don’t think you can win it.”

Instead, he said, “I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world.”

Republicans winced, Democrats pounced, and within a day Bush was back to promising victory.

He wasn’t the only presidential candidate that year to take heat for adding a shade of gray to a typically black-and-white national debate. Democratic nominee (and future Obama secretary of state) John Kerry told the New York Times two months later that “we have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance.”

Citing his experience as a former prosecutor, Kerry told the Times: “I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Democrats winced, Republicans pounced, and soon Kerry was sounding more like Bush.

Ten years after Bush and Kerry’s experiences, Obama had one of his own brushes with politically risky nuance. At a Sept. 3, 2014, press conference with Estonia’s president, Obama laid out his vision for how to defeat the Islamic State.

“If we are joined by the international community, we can continue to shrink ISIL’s sphere of influence, its effectiveness, its financing, its military capabilities to the point where it is a manageable problem,” he said.

“I actually think Americans can,” Rhodes said. But “it’s easier politically sometimes to use more maximalist rhetoric because it’s more satisfying to people — that we’re going to wipe them off the face of the earth, eradicate them for all time,” he added.

Bush’s “rhetoric was so ambitious that it was almost like just knocking over the Taliban wasn’t sufficient, that [it led to] the types of policies that we would have not [otherwise] engaged in, be it the war in Iraq or the opening of Gitmo or the employment of enhanced interrogation techniques,” Rhodes said. “It was almost a logical end of the type of rhetoric that was being used, in that if you are using a certain type of maximalist rhetoric with the public, you in some ways are raising the bar on yourself to do more things.”

Obama’s Republican critics, like Sen. Ted Cruz, have criticized the president’s refusal to describe America’s enemy as “radical Islamic terrorism,” charging that he is out of touch. Cruz has also demanded that Obama take “decisive action for victory over evil” and that ISIS to be “utterly destroyed.”

Obama aides express frustration at the notion that the United States can wipe out every last ISIS adherent. They are also mindful that yesterday’s boast can come back to haunt them, the way Obama’s confident reelection campaign message that “al-Qaida is on the run” did after extremists assaulted U.S. facilities in Benghazi in September 2012, killing four Americans.

With Obama’s reelection safely in the rear-view mirror, the White House now is echoing the more nuanced language that once got Bush in trouble on the Today show, and Kerry in his interview with the Times.

“I don’t think you’re ever going to eliminate the use of terrorism,” Rhodes said. “There will be people who murder other people who are innocent for political purposes for the rest of human history.”

To the extent that there can be an end to what Bush dubbed “the global war on terrorism,” Rhodes explained, it will require things in America’s hands and also some well outside of U.S. control — and it may take decades.

“There has to be, number one, a sufficient defensive and deterrent effect so that it is understood that if you self-identify as a terrorist organization at war with the United States that you’re likely to be killed,” he said.

But the second thing that must happen is for Middle Eastern governments to find ways to address “grievance and dissent” so that anger does not turn into a “nihilistic war against the world.”

Rhodes pointed to Northern Ireland and said “cultural shifts” led the Irish Republican Army to abandon terrorist tactics.

All this worry, worry, worry, for nothing. The Government does not interfere with the people or man or woman, don’t believe me, look at any code or ordinance, such as the vehicle code or penal code, notice, they never say Law. You will find only persons “shall” (future tense term) do this or that. The codes do not apply to the people or man. A code will never “stand” in court, it has no vocal cords. Go out an play and stop worrying. Just remind your public servants you are man and they are a man and all men are free and independent…

Thank you for reading this brief essay on my web site AND for YOUR COMMENT!!!

If you look in any good LAW dictionary (Black’s 4th Edition or earlier OR Bouvier’s from about 1852 or so), you will find that the words “SHALL” and “MUST” in law actually mean “MAY”. – as in you “may” or “may not” choose to obey a legislated act (statute) or any of its offspring (regulations, by-laws, etc.) And the word “REQUIRE” in law actually means “REQUEST”. A CODE is simply a collection of statutes. (These definitions are left out of more “modern” law dictionaries, for obvious political reasons – but those terms were well understood by the Founders and the people in America and Britain from the early 1600’s until about the 1860’s, changing ever so slowly over time. BUT even the U.S. Supreme Court has recently issued rulings affirming the definitions I presented here!!!! (They are just not covered by the mainstream media.) And they most certainly are NOT taught in American law schools!!!!

In short, you are CORRECT.

As I stated in my brief article, legislated acts (statutes) and their offspring are merely “OFFERS TO CONTRACT”, which (as is true for ALL contracts) one may agree to or not agree to. The “catch” is that the states and U.S. government (especially the courts) make the PRESUMPTION that you have AGREED to their contract (statute), thereby giving them JURISDICTION over you. And the ancient Maxims of Law still applies today: “A presumption NOT rebutted stands as the Truth.” and “Silence is consent.” After I learned all this stuff for my Ph.D. in the political history of British and American law, I NEVER went to go court without submitting to the court a written, notarized AFFIDAVIT (submitted in-person to the Clerk of the Court, who stamps 2 copies – 1 for the judge and my own copy; the Clerk of the Court MUST accept it if you write on it “Submitted on Demand”) rebutting all such presumptions by the court, along with a list of MY definitions to be used in the case. In the affidavit, I give the court seven (7) days to respond – and if it does NOT respond within those 7 days, then BY DEFAULT the court has agreed with me and accepted everything in my affidavit as the truth in the law of the case. Maxims of Law: “An unrebutted affidavit stands as the truth in Law.” and “He, who does not object, consents.”

(It is easy to do: only the first page of the affidavit gets changed in a few places. The rest, such as Maxims of Law, my definitions, etc., stay the same.) The court will almost NEVER respond with a rebuttal of my affidavit within those 7 days, it has AGREED to everything in my affidavit – so it (the state and the judge) have LOST by default. IF I decide to appear in court (which is almost NEVER), I have a notarized, stamped-by-the-Court-Clerk, copy of this affidavit. The judge can NOT ignore it, for he will be subject to criminal and civil actions if he does so. Further, I can turn this affidavit into an “International Commercial Lien” (explained in another article on my web site) thereby “freezing” ALL his current and future assets for 99 years (or forever if I place it in a trust). And if I register this Lien with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it becomes a “negotiable instrument” which I can sell to any investor, investment bank, etc. Since my Liens are typically for $50 Million and a buyer will usually offer between 1-2% of this nominal value, that means I just made $500,000 to $1 Million tax-free dollars. And NO COURT in the world can over-turn this Lien, since it is created by a non-judicial process in which there was NO controversy (recall that, by not responding with his own “notarized affidavit of rebuttal”, the judge has ALREADY AGREED with everything in my original affidavit) – and where there is NO controversy, NO court may assume jurisdiction!!! And if one does appear in court, let your DOCUMENTS do all the “talking” – NEVER say anything more! If pressed by the judge to “explain” something, just say, “It is ALL explained in the documents submitted, so I have absolutely nothing to add.” And do NOT swear any OATH in court, since that negates your documents and gives the judge jurisdiction over you. Remember the Maxim of Law, “An oath is a contract in law.” And at this point, you do NOT want to create a new contract with the court by swearing an oath!

Do NOT expect lawyers (except for International Commercial Lien specialists) or lower-court judges to know this stuff, since it is never taught in U.S. law schools. But a judge on the Appeals Court level will often know about it; and most definitely a judge on a state or federal supreme court. Lastly, if ANYONE tries to interfere with this Lien, that person may be easily added to the Lien by simply writing his name, title, address and brief description of what he did onto the back of the Lien – so ALL his assets get “frozen” also and he then also owes me $50 Million!!!

One can “beat the system” IF one knows the system – and then use the system against “the powers that be”. I have used “International Commercial Liens” on 6 people (all U.S. officials); and won EVERY time! (This is in another article on this web site about “DONUTS, etc”.) And I NEVER paid for any out-of-state traffic ticket, parking ticket, etc – only those in Massachusetts because my drivers license was a CONTRACT with the state.

By the way, I now live most of the year in Ukraine or Crimea – so I no longer have to deal with courts in the U.S.

Best wishes! JHH

Extra Stuff:

After the ratification of the original (“organic”) “The Constitution for the united States of America”, written in plain English for all to understand, the courts, Congress and people accepted as FACTS OF LAW that the people as individuals were the sovereigns of the Union states, the various states were viewed as separate “foreign countries with respect to each other and with respect the United States”; and most almost all legislated acts (statutes; from which regulations were written) applied ONLY to employees and agents of the U.S. government. The Congress had jurisdiction only over Washington City, as the seat of the federal government, federal Territories, federal forts and naval stations within a state; and federal buildings within a state, usually federal Post offices. Federal statutes applied to people living in one of the sovereign states ONLY if that individual man CONSENTED to that particular statute. The federal courts existed solely to settle disputes between states; and disputes between people from two different states.

..at the Revolution, the sovereignty devolved on the people; and they are truly the sovereigns of the country, but they are sovereigns without subjects…with none to govern but themselves….. [CHISHOLM v. GEORGIA (US) 2 Dall 419, 454, 1 L Ed 440, 455 @DALL (1793) pp471-472.]

“There is no such thing as a power of inherent sovereignty in the government of the United States …. In this country sovereignty resides in the people, and Congress can exercise no power which they have not, by their Constitution entrusted to it: All else is withheld.” — Julliard v. Greenman, 110 U.S. 421..

The people of this State, as the successors of its former sovereign, are entitled to all the rights which formerly belonged to the King by his prerogative. [Lansing v. Smith, 4 Wend. 9 (N.Y.) (1829), 21 Am.Dec. 89 10C Const. Law Sec. 298; 18 C Em.Dom. Sec. 3, 228; 37 C Nav.Wat. Sec. 219; Nuls Sec. 167; 48 C Wharves Sec. 3, 7.]

“It will be admitted on all hands that with the exception of the powers granted to the states and the federal government, through the Constitutions, the people of the several states are unconditionally sovereign within their respective states.“ ~ Ohio L. Ins. & T. Co. v. Debolt, 16 How. 416, 14 L.Ed. 997 (1854)

“Our government is founded upon compact [contract]. Sovereignty was, and is, in the people“ — Glass v. Sloop Betsey, U.S. Supreme Court, 1794.

Even Alexander Hamilton (1st Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington) and one of the most ardent advocates for a strong central government wrote, “Necessity and expediency are NOT legitimate excuses for violating the Constitution you swore to uphold and protect – even during a ‘crisis’“.

“The Constitution for the united States of America”, written in plain English for all to understand, the courts, Congress and people accepted as FACTS OF LAW that the people as individuals were the sovereigns of the Union states, “the various states are separate foreign countries with respect to each other and with respect to the United States” (from various U.S. Supreme Court rulings)

Comments Off on Barack Obama domestic enemy of and traitor to the United States of America its Constitution and Bill of Rights.

“If we ever pass out as a great nation we ought to put on our tombstone, ‘America died from a delusion that she has moral leadership.’” – Will Rogers (1879-1935) American Humorist, Actor and Author

“Necessity and expediency are NOT legitimate excuses for violating the Constitution you swore to uphold and protect – even during a ‘crisis’”. – Alexander Hamilton (1st Secretary of the Treasury under President George Washington)

“The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.” —John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Economist and Political Philosopher, [On Liberty(1859) 1977:220]

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens)

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” – Frederick Douglass

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.” Henry L. Mencken (1880-1956), Journalist and Author

We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we HATE and FEAR — unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called ‘the insolence of elected persons’ – in word, free men…”Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980), American Journalist and Author

“Rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add ‘within the law,’ because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the rights of the individual.” — Thomas Jefferson

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

THE PROBLEM

We have all become “Voluntary Slaves” to systems of government and social institutions we dislike, to greater or lesser degrees. To ancient Romans the word “system” referred to the city sewers, so we today live in a government sewer. Not that we knowingly and willingly volunteered to do so; we merely acquiesce – we “go along”. It is the world into which we were born. In the film “The Truman Show” with actor Jim Carrey, the show’s director explained why Truman, whose entire life has been broadcast as a TV show, never questioned the authenticity of his world: “We all accept the world we are born into – it’s as simple as that.” But like the Truman (True Man) character, we all sense that something is wrong. Our reason and inherent common sense – what many call a “gut feeling” – tell us that the system is corrupt and unjust. If only we would listen to our inner voice of reason!

Who among us would pay the numerous and ever-increasing taxes and fees that are levied by our governments if we were not forced to do so under threats of fines and imprisonment – or worse? What American is not afraid of the IRS, even though all the federal income taxes collected are deposited by the Secretary of the Treasury into a privately-owned corporation in Puerto Rico and thereafter distributed among foreign creditors of the U.S. government to pay for the interest (and ONLY the interest) on America’s national debt. Who would willingly pay to huge corporations the inflated prices demanded for such basic necessities of life as food, electricity, water and fuel to heat our homes? We are further required, under the same threats of violence, to obey statutes, codes and regulations (so-called “laws”) created at the arbitrary whims of our rulers and which we find ridiculous and even hurtful to us. If you were driving your child to the hospital during a life-threatening emergency and came to a very long “red” traffic light on a deserted road, would you wait until the light turned “green”? By all logic waiting for the “green” light, thereby risking your child’s life, makes no sense – it defies reason and our innate common sense! (I am reminded of a cartoon of many years ago where a man sitting on a camel in the middle of a bleak desert waits at a traffic light – a similar scene was in Mel Brooks’ comedy-western film, “Blazing Saddles”, in which a posse on horseback are stopped at a toll-gate in the middle of nowhere. Instead of simply riding around the toll-gate, the character played by actor Slim Pickens shouts, “Somebody go back to town and get a shitload of dimes!”) But there are many among us who would wait – in fact most people will wait. As “law-abiding Americans”, most people would not even think of ignoring the traffic light – and the few people who did ignore it would feel guilty for doing so! Why? Because it is the “law”? Because we should instead seek redress through the courts within our “justice system”, a device clearly controlled by the government rulers? Is it some type of “herd mentality” that controls our behavior and even our thoughts? In short, why do we obey any government when its demands are arbitrary, excessive, hurtful and defy common sense?

I am a retired physician and medical researcher, so I have a lot of time to indulge in reading everything I come across on the Internet regarding politics, law and history. Not that I am smart – I simply do not like to watch football, etc. on TV. It was only recently that I stumbled upon a brief essay that “explained it all” in fewer than 25 pages. Surprisingly, although it was written by a law-philosophy student in France in 1552, it applies to our political institutions today. It is called, “The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” by Etienne De La Boetie.

Boetie said there are three types of tyrants: those that rule by conquest or force of arms, those that rule by inheritance (royalty) and those that rule through elections by the people. Of these he felt that an elected leader was the most tyrannical since he never wishes to relinquish his power, even though required to do so upon completion of his term of office. Having tasted power, few men in government wish to yield that power. Today in America we change presidents, senators and representative (not to mention state and local leaders) every few years, but our governments continue their maltreatment of the people regardless of which political party gains power. Why do We the People tolerate this servitude and often even misery?

“That so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.”

Boetie’s asserted that we tolerate this voluntary servitude by custom and habit. A “Man from Mars” might wonder, How could one man (or small group of men) possibly rule with such maltreatment such great numbers of people? Or as Boetie said, “Who could really believe that one man alone may mistreat a hundred thousand and deprive them of their liberty? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice?” Boetie’s answer was “No”, it was simply that people were accustomed to condition, as were their fathers, grandfathers and so on. “Two, possibly ten, may fear one [man]; but when a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth, any more than valor can be termed the effort of one individual to scale a fortress, to attack an army, or to conquer a kingdom. What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name?” The masses of people become slaves through custom and habit, reinforced by their leader’s exploitation of the people’s own apathy, indifference and laziness. The main reason we so willingly take orders from authority is that we are born submissive serfs, reared as submissive serfs, educated to remain submissive serfs and trained to work as submissive serfs.

THE METHODS

What tools does a leader or government use to keep us in servitude? It is obvious that one man cannot control all the people by himself. The ruler must have the assistance of some of the people among us: first are the ruling elite, followed by a large bureaucracy. the police and a military – each created in hierarchical fashion of rank and class with corresponding levels of rewards. These organizations of servants must be ever-enlarging; not to accomplish anything of substance, but simply to make more and more people dependent on government for their livelihood and status. The police and military cannot exist solely for the protection of the rulers, since history has proved repeatedly that no ruler is truly safe; that if a ruler is greatly despised, he can be deposed or assassinated without much effort (usually by someone in his inner circle). “The torment in which tyrants find themselves when obliged to fear everyone because they do evil unto every man … not daring to entrust weapons in the hands of their own people, whom they have wronged.”

The servants closest to the ruler, the ruling elite (both in and out of government), remain few in number and are controlled by means of what Boetie called “special privileges and large gifts”. Boetie ironically noted: “Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves, or as if anyone could possess under a tyrant a single thing in his own name. Yet they act as if their wealth really belonged to them, and forget that it is they themselves who give the ruler the power to deprive everybody of everything, leaving nothing that anyone can identify as belonging to somebody.” Within this ruling elite (most of whom are usually not even formal members of the ruler’s government) are “only four or five who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him. Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his cruelties, companions in his pleasures, panders to his lusts, and sharers in his plunders. These six manage their chief so successfully that he comes to be held accountable not only for his own misdeeds but even for theirs.” Under the authority of the ruling elite next come the bureaucrats, police and military. Boetie observed: “The six [ruling elites] have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment except through their influence. The consequence of all this is fatal indeed. And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied.”

Obviously the ruling elite and those we today call “public servants” must be paid their “special privileges and large gifts” – some might say, bribes – to maintain their allegiance to the ruler and his government. These gifts from the ruler – extracted from the masses of people – may come as pay, tax breaks and grants. Some among the masses of people often receive gifts as well: welfare, food stamps, and the too-numerous-to-count government programs giving people something for “FREE”, even though the people themselves ultimately pay for it! “Tyrants would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce [an ancient Roman coin]: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, “Long live the King!” The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them … the mob has always behaved in this way — eagerly open to bribes that cannot be honorably accepted.” Clearly, we ALL want “our share” of the government pie – a pie we ourselves provided to government!

However, the ruler system creates universal anxiety. The ruler can have no friends; he can never fully trust anyone or feel completely secure in his power. ”The fact is thatthe tyrant is never truly loved, nor does he love… there can be no friendship where there is cruelty, where there is disloyalty, where there is injustice.” The ancients wrote: To rule as king is to be alone. Today we say: “It is lonely at the top.” The ruling elite live under similar anxieties as the ruler – “in places where the wicked gather there is conspiracy only, not companionship: these have no affection for one another; fear alone holds them together; they are not friends, they are merely accomplices.” Yet who among us would not accept these “special privileges and large gifts” from the ruler? After all, why work for a living when you can obtain wealth and status with little or no effort? “These wretches see the glint of the despot’s treasures and are bedazzled by the radiance of his splendor. Drawn by this brilliance they come near, without realizing they are approaching a flame that cannot fail to scorch them.” Only later do the ruling elite understand fully that the ruler, upon his mere whim, can take from them all they possess. ”The favorites of a tyrant can never feel entirely secure, and the less so because he [the ruler] has learned from them that he is all powerful and unlimited by any law or obligation.” Even if a member of the ruling elite manages to remain in the good graces of the current ruler, what about the ruler’s successor – the next president, prime minister, king, queen, or dictator? How can any person, even among the highest of the ruling elite, ever feel truly secure in his and his family’s wealth and status now or in the future? “Even admitting that favorites may at times escape from the hands of him they serve, they are never safe from the ruler who comes after him. If he is good, they must render an account of their past and recognize at last that justice exists; if he is bad and resembles their late master, he [the next ruler] will certainly have his own favorites, who are not usually satisfied to occupy in their turn merely the posts of their predecessors, but will more often insist on their wealth and their lives.” Of course, the great lie underpinning our system is that we own nothing – our government can take our property on a whim. Even if you have fully paid off the mortgage on your home, simply look at the deed and you will see that you are probably listed as a “tenant-in-common” with “fee simple” title or “title in equity” – and a tenant is someone who pays rent and taxes. A true owner with “allodial” title pays no rent or taxes. As the actor Peter Fonda stated, “Try not paying your taxes and find out who owns your house.”

In addition to gifts and privileges to his ruling elite, the ruler employs another tool. He creates and maintains a remoteness from the people, thereby creating a mystique and aura of the leader being “special” simply by being inaccessible to the public masses. “The earliest kings of Egypt rarely showed themselves without carrying a cat, or sometimes a branch, or appearing with fire on their heads, masking themselves with these objects and parading like workers of magic. By doing this they inspired their subjects with reverence and admiration … It is pitiful to review the list of devices that early despots used to establish their tyranny; to discover how many little tricks they employed, always finding the populace conveniently gullible.” Tyrants and despots have “always fooled their victims so easily that, while mocking them, they enslaved them the more.” Today when a president, a queen or a prime minister goes out in public, the remoteness is maintained: they travel in limousines with darkly-tinted windows and near which the masses are not allowed. Even when simply playing golf, a president and the people are kept apart. And on rare occasions when the ruler is seen by the people, his appearance is an occasion of great ceremony, accompanied by symbols and pageantry. Today we have ceremonies such as royal coronations, presidential inaugurations, state-of-the-union speeches and proclamations to the nation – all on prime-time TV. The symbols of the ruler’s specialness” appear: the presidential seal, a king or queen’s crown and throne, flags, ornate offices and buildings, monuments and statues. His servants address the ruler by such titles as the “Leader of the Free World”, “Mr. President”, “Her Majesty the Queen” or “His Eminence The Pope” – and in turn the ruling elite are addressed by such titles as Senator, Congressman, Mr. Chief Justice, CEO of XYZ corporation, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Secretary of the ABC Department, Ambassador and so on. After all, without a title, you must be a “nobody” – just one of the people.

Even when simply traveling the ruler, whose life is somehow deemed of greater value than ours, uses special transportation: the president’s plane “Air Force One”, the royal carriage, the royal yacht, the presidential helicopter, not to mention the gaggle of limousines surrounded by hordes of police, “Secret Service” and innumerable security vehicles. Upon arriving at the ceremony, special guards (usually outfitted in ridiculously ornate uniforms) stand to salute the ruler, while offering no real protection – they are part of the show! Visualize, if you will, the queen’s Royal Guards at Buckingham Palace in London. Or the almost clownish formality of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia – why are they wearing such ornate costumes while guarding dead people? Boetie noted, “Whoever thinks that halberds, sentries, the placing of the watch, serve to protect and shield tyrants is, in my judgment, completely mistaken. These are used, it seems to me, more for ceremony and a show of force than for any reliance placed in them.” Some rulers even encourage the development of a cult-like admiration, often extending into myth and religion such as “the divine right of kings”, the myths about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and the god-like status of the later Egyptian pharaohs. Boetie observed: “Tyrants themselves have wondered that men could endure the persecution of a single man; they have insisted on using religion for their own protection and, where possible, have borrowed a stray bit of divinity to bolster up their evil ways.”

In a well-informed and enlightened society, the tools described above could not long maintain a ruler’s tyranny, for eventually the people will become disenchanted, less productive – and even may question the injustice of the system under which they live and challenge the authority of the government. The ruler cannot allow this to happen. Thousands of years ago rulers learned that entertainment and amusements divert the people’s attention away from truly important issues affecting their lives. Boetie noted: “Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny.” Over thousands of years not much has changed – today we have our mass-media, professional sports, TV, computer games, alcohol and drugs, activities, pastimes and pleasures that keep us too busy to notice, much less act upon, the public issues which so greatly affect our lives. By our many entertainments (may I call them “circuses”?) and diversions we are truly similar to the peoples of centuries past. “By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”

Ancient rulers also understood the truth in the adage “Divide and Conquer”. They recognized the importance of distracting and dividing the people by income, race and class differences, and through political affiliations (parties). Boetie: “Thus the despot subdues his subjects, some of them by means of others, and thus is he protected by those from whom, if they were decent men, he would have to guard himself; just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself.” To ensure that the masses of people, in their misery and oppression, never challenge the authority of the ruler, the ruler must deflect all blame onto some of his servants, including the ruling elite and the bureaucracy; OR onto forces and peoples outside his kingdom or government – foreigners. The ruler also blames those who challenge his policies, applying such labels as malcontents, hippies, trouble makers, protesters, conspiracy theorists, home-grown terrorists, etc. Likewise the ruler blames foreign rulers and foreign peoples for the misery that he himself created among the masses of his own people – even to the extent of starting wars. The successful ruler will deflect all blame from himself in order that ”the people never blame the tyrant for the evils they suffer, but they do place responsibility on those who influence him; peoples, nations, all compete with one another, even the peasants, even the tillers of the soil, in mentioning the names of the favorites, in analyzing their vices, and heaping upon them a thousand insults, a thousand obscenities, a thousand maledictions. All their prayers, all their vows are directed against these persons;they hold them accountable for all their misfortunes, their pestilences, their famines.” Meanwhile the tyrant remains safely in power.

Past rulers also recognized the power behind money, even “fake money” created by the ruler himself as paper currency or coins of otherwise worthless metals. As Boetie stated, “What comment can I make concerning another fine counterfeit that ancient peoples accepted as true money?” Boetie wondered by what magic a piece of paper, a coin of worthless metal or a piece of wood (English “tally stick”) obtain real value? Boetie queried, “They [the people] believed firmly that the great toe of Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, performed miracles and cured diseases … In this wise that a foolish people itself invents lies and then believes them.” Does an otherwise worthless object obtain its value simply because the ruler has decreed this paper, metal or wood to be the only form of money acceptable as payment for taxes? By definition, something of “real value” is something upon which people place value because of its utility, something they need and can use in their daily lives. Otherwise, why would any people possessing reason and common sense accept as money objects possessing no real usefulness? Such trinkets are NOT money – they are, at most, convenient tokens for mere promises to pay you something of REAL usefulness at a later date. Can you say “Federal Reserve note”, today’s official U.S. Dollar?

Finally, among the most useful tools employed by tyrants and governments are propaganda and speeches, the “power of persuasion” through the manipulation of words evoking passion instead of reason within the people. As Boetie observed in 1552, rulers and governments of all types “do not behave very differently: they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing it with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good.”

THE SOLUTION

The important question now becomes: How can we escape this voluntary servitude? Or, are we Americans are fond of saying, How can we get government off our backs? In early America our ancestors modeled their society and governments on Christian principles whereby their God, as the creator of all things including man, was the Sovereign and Master of all things, including man. Likewise, man was the sovereign and master of all things he created. Consequently, in America, We the People, as the creators of our local state and federal governments and institutions, were considered the sovereigns and masters of those governments and institutions. As with God, no master or sovereign serves his subjects, else he ceases to be master and sovereign. Until the early 20th century We the People were considered as master and sovereign over our creation: the government. I have attempted to explain how today this relationship has been turned on its head – how the people are now expected to obey every command issued by our supposed servants, the government. Indeed, many Americans today are grateful that the governments seize only 60 percent of their income as taxes and fees! Elections most certainly have made no improvements, despite the promises made every 4 years! – the extortion by government and misery of We the People increase relentlessly. But is a violent revolution really necessary to rid ourselves of the tyranny? If violent action were required, Boetie knew that most men would not participate since they are not men of action; they dislike the time and effort involved and the risk of losing whatever little they possess. In the 20th century the common adage was, “You can’t beat city hall.” Boetie concluded that not only was violent action not required, no action at all is required – only non-action through non-compliance. He wrote, “Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself.” Boetie, unlike most Americans today, recognized the important distinction between a country (the people) and a government (the ruler and the ruling elite).

Boetie implored, “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

CONCLUSIONS

If you do not like what the government does, simply refuse to cooperate. You do not like paying taxes, fees and fines? Then do not pay them! You do not like having to constantly renew this or that license or registration or permit or whatever? Then do not renew them! You do not like paying for parking and traffic tickets? Then ignore them – toss them into the trash! Of course some people might object. “What if EVERYONE did that?” My answers are: 1) Great! Then we would have less government bothering us and stealing our money. 2.) If “everyone did that”, then you would be a fool NOT to do likewise, if it is in your own best interest. I have little hope for the current generations of adults – we are too bound up in our own indulgences, pastimes and apathy; too bound by custom and habit. The motto of adult Americans appears to be: “As it is now, so must it be forever.” My hope lies with those who are too young to have been indoctrinated, distracted or “bought off” by the rulers. Not because they are more courageous than we, but because they will experience such hardship and misery in the coming years that they will not tolerate our rulers and system of government any longer – that they will rebel, not with the sword, but by simple non-cooperation. There is no need for violent revolution; no need even to walk the streets carrying a protest sign. As Boetie concluded centuries ago, they need only resolve to serve no more: to refuse to pay taxes and fees and fines, to refuse to obey so-called “laws” that violate our own powers of reason and common sense. They will cease ALL cooperation with government in any manner; and at once they will be freed.

Author’s note: Election season is in full blossom. Both sides have morphed from “let’s solidify our base” before the convention to “make whatever promises necessary” in order to win the election. Hillary is a full-blown criminal and serial liar and has been for the majority of her life. Trump needs someone to send him a fifty-five-gallon barrel of Aunt Jemima syrup to go with all of his waffles. (First Obama was not born in America—now he was; I will build a wall—-maybe, I will (might) export all illegal’s; I don’t trust those folks at Goldman Sachs who gave Hillary all of that money for speeches but I will hire one of their former employers to advise my campaign.) Unfortunately, those who get all caught up in election season even begin to make promises and lie for their favorite candidates. (Check Facebook; According to his supporters Trump will cancel all of Obama’s executive orders and prosecute the Obama’s and the Clinton’s as soon as he takes office.)

The huge problem is: that no matter which candidate wins the election they will be very limited in what they personally can do–simply because our government has been controlled by what has been referred to as the “Deep State,” “The Power Cabal,” “The National Security State” or simply the “Continuity of Government” plan which was implemented over 15 years ago. Yes, the candidate you vote for is simply a puppet who for 4 or 8 years will simply move according to pressure applied to their strings by operatives within the “Deep State” and dance to the music of the international banking orchestra. Here is an article I wrote on this subject some time back but it is most relevant today as well.

“The existence of the secret government was so closely held that Congress was completely bypassed.” ~James Bamford

Should anyone trust a man former president Richard Nixon once praised as “a ruthless little bastard?” What if this man teamed up with another lifelong politician who stated emphatically, “Principle is ok up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose the nomination?” These two men experienced tremendous influence in the power politics of our country for decades.

Although these men, void of any scruples other than might-makes-right, played musical chairs in the Gerald Ford administration, switching between Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense. They came together again with a purpose in the Ronald Reagan administration. They are, of course, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.

Reagan, every true Republican’s dream of the perfect president, was responsible for initiating the development of a plan which would totally suspend the Constitution and Bill of Rights and place the control of a “shadow government” into the hands of a very few people. Ostensibly this would only occur during a nuclear attack on this country and would ensure the continuity of government through the crisis. But, unfortunately, we have learned in this country that if a politician sees the opportunity to gain power and to do so would require a crisis, it is not beyond these people of little to no principles to create the necessary crisis. Since fabricating a nuclear attack on this country would require perhaps insurmountable challenges, the bar for the implementation of this shadow government had to be significantly lowered.

Reagan knew, or should have known, there were no provisions in the Constitution for its suspension in the time of emergency. Yet, Reagan set in motion, by secret directive, the formation and operational designs for such a proxy government. This was not only a written decree from the executive, it was actually practiced. Once a year three “teams” would be deployed throughout the country with people playacting the parts of president and cabinet members. These exercises would be conducted on a closed military facility or in some remote part of the country. Even though Donald Rumsfeld was not in government at the time, but was the CEO of a large pharmaceutical company and Dick Cheney was a member of Congress from Wyoming, both participated in these mock drills on a continuing basis. Since former presidential chiefs-of-staff usually played the part of the president in these drills, Rumsfeld and Cheney got lots of practice.

Presidential succession is set forth by the Constitution (Article II, Section 1, Clause 6) and the 25th Amendment; the continuity of government plan (COG) completely ignores both. Indeed, as previously stated, the entire COG is unconstitutional as an unelected bureaucrat could act as president.

Since the days of Alexander Hamilton and his merry band of monarchists, enterprising politicians with no principles, but tons of ambition, have set about to circumvent the restrictions and impediments to wealth and power known as either the Articles of Confederation or a Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The existence of the plans for a suspension of the constitution and rule by executive directive appears to have first surfaced publicly during the Iran-Contra hearings.

Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

Both North’s attorney and Sen. Daniel Inouye, the Democratic Chair of the Committee, responded in a way that showed they were aware of the issue:

Brendan Sullivan [North’s counsel, agitatedly]: Mr. Chairman?

[Senator Daniel] Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch upon that?

Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed, by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was an area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I’m certain arrangements can be made for an executive session.

Near the end of Reagan’s term in 1988, he would redefine the plan to include events other than a nuclear attack. (Executive Order 12656) COG now could be implemented with anything a member of the political power structure deemed a “national emergency.” Of course, what constitutes a national emergency is left to the discretion of those who would profit from such a determination. One cannot help but be reminded of Alexander Hamilton’s explanation to Thomas Jefferson as to what “necessary” means to a politician. Is there any wonder that Jefferson would write, “Hamilton was not only a monarchist, but for a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”

“… [N]ecessary often means no more than needful, requisite, incidental, useful, or conducive to …” ~ Alexander Hamilton

Was it plan or providence that brought Rumsfeld and Cheney back into power when the Supreme Court suspended an election, ordered the state of Florida to stop counting the people’s votes, and declared George W. Bush president?

Cheney, when made the chair of the committee to select a VP candidate to fill out the ticket of George W. Bush, decided the most qualified candidate for that office was himself. And his longtime political partner, Rumsfeld, was installed as Secretary of Defense.

Then, of course, along came 9/11. In the interest of full disclosure, let me here state the only thing I am sure of concerning the events of 9/11 is that our government is lying about the entire event.

But, it is beyond argument that 9/11 did occur; it is also beyond debate that within hours of those events, Dick Cheney, not President Bush, enacted the Continuity of Government (COG) plan which suspended the Constitution. (Please note: one of the originators of an act which suspended constitutional governance in this country, implemented that plan to suspend the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, an unconstitutional act on its face.) I’m sure that Hamilton and his disciples Cheney and Rumsfeld would declare 9/11 necessitated the need for such an action.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants” ~ William Pitt

“Useful and necessary was always the tyrant’s plea.” ~ C. S. Lewis

Unfortunately, most citizens of this country had no idea a plan had been implemented that created a secret “shadow government” unencumbered with rules, regulations and inspection by Congress or the public. The first possible awareness appeared in an article in the Washington Post in March of 2002 titled, “Shadow Government is at work in Secret.” The article can be found here.

It became readily apparent neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives were aware of this “shadow government” and certainly had not been consulted on its implementation. Could it be the Patriot Act, a tyrannical, unconstitutional piece of legislation was created by this secret government? One thing for sure is: two of the strongest dissenters to this proposal were Tom Daschle, Senate Majority leader and Patrick Leahy, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Is it mere coincidence these two opponents to the Patriot Act received letters containing spores of deadly Anthrax? Is it also coincidence that shortly after that, both dropped their opposition?

We know that President George W. Bush continued the “shadow government” on May 9, 2007, with National Security Presidential Directive 51 and Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20. Only the unclassified portions of these directives were published. When Congressman Peter DeFazio of the Homeland Security Commission asked to see the classified portions of this presidential and Homeland Security directive, his request was denied.

We also know that Obama continued the continuity of government plans as established during the Bush administration on July 27th, 2009 stating his administration draws “no distance between their own policies and those left behind by the Bush administration.”

John McCain stated in 2008 that the “war on terror” could last 100 years. Leon Panetta, another former SecDef, said the war against ISIS could take up to 30 years. We know that to continue with the suspension of at least portions of the Constitution requires a “national emergency.” There is no finer claim for emergency than being in a war that is expected to last for years.

War requires an enemy, and for the better part of 40 years our out-of-control national security apparatus has either lied us into wars or created the enemies we fight. There is substantial, credible evidence our shadow government created, financed and equipped al-Qaeda, ISIS, al Nusra and the Azov Battalion in the Ukraine. See here for evidence of our support for the Nazis in the Ukraine.

War is the reason for this secret government and those within this power cabal will continue to foment and prosecute wars because it accomplishes two important goals: The cabal has no restrictions on its actions while those in the military/industrial/congressional complex grow wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and the people are continually subjected to liberty destroying legislation such as the Patriot Act, NDAA, and a heavily militarized police state.

We have a criminal enterprise in power in this country that has suspended our Constitution and Bill of Rights and rules by secret orders from a shadow government. Elections mean nothing. Electing a person to congress who has no power when it comes to confronting this shadow government is an effort in futility. Electing a new president is a waste of time, money and effort. He/she has already bought into this madness or they would not stand a chance of being elected for the cabal controlled mainstream media is truly the electorate. They declare who or who is not electable and the masses follow their lead.

No American will ever be free as long as this shadow government is in control.

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation’s other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings – about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year – a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the top-secret world created to respond to the terrorist attacks has grown into an unwieldy enterprise spread over 10,000 U.S. locations. Launch Photo Gallery »

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation’s security.

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

“I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it’s impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. “Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.”

The Post’s investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for describing their concerns.

The Post’s online database of government organizations and private companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today’s article describes the government’s role in this expanding enterprise. Tuesday’s article describes the government’s dependence on private contractors. Wednesday’s is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is available at washingtonpost.com/topsecretamerica.

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those programs for waste. “Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, ‘Okay, we’ve built tremendous capability, but do we have more than we need?’ ” he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he’s begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable. “Particularly with these deficits, we’re going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that.”

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers,” he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know. “I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together where they need to,” he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give a speech, he mused about The Post’s findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”

Part 2

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can’t conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn’t include the Air Force’s mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there’s a big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Each day at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, workers review at least 5,000 pieces of terrorist-related data from intelligence agencies and keep an eye on world events. (Photo by: Melina Mara / The Washington Post)

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

Part 3

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn’t have power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D. Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI’s rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte’s office was all of 11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system’s ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It’s too hard, and some agency heads don’t really want to give up the systems they have. But there’s some progress: “All my e-mail on one computer now,” Leiter says. “That’s a big deal.”

Part 4

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth’s geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government’s Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases. Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices “on the order of the pyramids,” in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will increase the agency’s office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters, which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the region.

It’s not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this expansion, it’s also what is inside: banks of television monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. “In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. “They’ve got the penis envy thing going. You can’t be a big boy unless you’re a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF.”

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

“You can’t find a four-star general without a security detail,” said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. “Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, ‘If he has one, then I have to have one.’ It’s become a status symbol.”

Part 5

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries – Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan – and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn’t know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on living” is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. “It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI’s assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. “I saw tremendous overlap.”

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?”

He’s hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It’s too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

“Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?”

“Why does it have to be so bulky?”

“Why isn’t it online?”

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don’t dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency’s analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

The ODNI’s analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 culls more than two dozen agencies’ reports and 63 Web sites, selects the best information and packages it by originality, topic and region.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

“Frankly, it hasn’t been brought together in a unified approach,” CIA Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it’s funded, it’s hot and it’s sexy.”

Part 6

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex., killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan’s increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk “adverse events.” He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

From avatars and lasers to thermal cameras and fidget meters, this multimedia gallery takes a look at some of the latest technologies being developed by the government and private companies to thwart terrorists. Launch Gallery »

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902’s commander had decided to turn the unit’s attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The assessment “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already,” said the Army’s senior counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers. These are called Special Access Programs – or SAPs – and the Pentagon’s list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means that very few people have a complete sense of what’s going on.

“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do you mean you can’t tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI ought to do something similar.”

The ODNI hasn’t done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community. But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.

Part 7

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response, President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

“There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn’t the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. “We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. “Because no one intelligence entity, or team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more – more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as Liberty Crossing.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS!

Ladies and gentlemen there is nothing on earth that government can’t fuck up, when their secret objective is to bankrupt every thing in America and the rest of the world, so the new world order is justified. At least in their minds, this is being obedient to their masters, The Investment Banking Cartel. What stupid s.o.b. will be advising his/her boss that I am a threat to National security, just so he/she can take home more money than they’re worth? Welcome to hell on earth!

TN Note: Huxley’s 1932 book Brave New World wrote of fully engineered test-tube babies who were created for their particular stations of society, work and education. The time for public ethical debate is now, because scientists are moving full-speed ahead without public input. It is important to recognize that almost all of this kind of research is being conducted with some form of taxpayer funding. The Technocrat-minded scientist invents because he can.

Stanford law professor and bioethicist Hank Greely predicts that in the future most people in developed countries won’t have sex to make babies. Instead they’ll choose to control their child’s genetics by making embryos in a lab.

On KQED’s Forum program, Michael Krasny spoke with Greely about his new book, The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction. Greely highlights the ethical and legal questions that might arise in the future’s reproductive paradigm.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Krasny: There are a lot of new advances, technology and so forth. We reached the point where you get some sperm donor and a little piece of skin and you’re in business because of stem cells.

Greely: My book argues that two different biomedical innovations coming from different directions and not really propelled by reproduction are going to combine here. One is whole-genome sequencing, and the other is what I call easy PGD, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, [that] is, getting rid of egg harvest … which is unpleasant, dangerous and really expensive.

This ties in with in vitro fertilization also being not as onerous as it has been in the past.

What I think is going to happen, we’ll be able to take some skin cells from anyone and turn them into any cell type. Make these into eggs or sperm and that is going to make IVF much easier, cheaper and less dangerous.

You [can] decide, “Well, I want these traits,” and it becomes a selective process.

Yes, I think we will see an increased and broad use of embryo selection. I would be careful to set the time frame at 20-40 years. I think we’ll actually see a world where most babies born to people with good health coverage will be conceived in the lab. People will make about a hundred embryos, each will have its whole genome tested, and the parents will be [asked … “Tell] us what you want to know and then tell us what embryo you want.”

This could bring down health care costs, and it is also good for same-sex couples, isn’t it?

Well, yes and maybe. I think it should bring down health care costs, and, in fact, one of the advantages to it is that it would be so beneficial for public health care costs that I think it would be provided for free. If it costs say, $10,000 to start a baby this way, 100 babies is a million dollars. If you avoid the birth of one baby with a serious genetic disease, you’ve saved $3 [million to] $5 million. The same-sex issue, I think that’s going to work, but that’s another jump. That would be taking a skin cell … from a woman and turning it into a sperm. I think [it’s] probable, but that hasn’t been done yet.

This is not the end of sex — because recreational sex will always be with us — it’s the end of sex as a way of procreating.

I think it will not be the complete end. I think people will still get pregnant the old-fashioned way, right, sometimes for religious reasons, sometimes for philosophical reasons, sometimes for romantic reasons, sometimes because they are teenagers and the back seat of the car is there.

A lot of people talk about playing God, but before we get into that, there’s the rubric of consumer eugenics. And there is a eugenics fear when we start talking about selection.

There certainly is. Eugenics is a slippery word; it means many things to different people. To some, it’s state-enforced reproductive control. To some … what we had was state-enforced sterilization. To some, it’s any kind of reproductive choices, but those are different things. For me, I think the coercion is much more important than the issues of selection. The concern about the state or the insurance company or someone else, forcing you to pick particular babies, worries me a lot more than having parents make choices, though that raises its own set of questions.

What do you see as the biggest question here?

I worry about the dilemma of Republican legislators in very conservative states. They want to spend as little money as possible on Medicaid. I could imagine a state saying, “We’re not going to pay for this via Medicaid,” which would mean that the roughly 40-50 percent of babies born in that state who are paid for by Medicaid wouldn’t get to go through this, and although they are not “superbabies,” adding another 10-20 percent health advantage to the babies of the rich over the babies of the poor is a bad thing.

Listen to the full interview here. Greely shares his thoughts on cost, socioeconomics, gene editing and the ethics of designer babies.

The CDC’s new proposal, published in the Federal Register [#2016-18103], will give the agency police state powers, permitting CDC officials to detain and forcibly inject chemicals into anyone they deem a threat to public health. There’s no rationale for such detainments either. According to the proposal, the “CDC defines precommunicable stage to mean the stage beginning upon an individual’s earliest opportunity for exposure to an infectious agent.”

Who owns your body?

This proposal is an open declaration that the U.S. government now owns your body. At least that’s what the CDC seems to be claiming. The truth of the matter is that each individual has certain inherent, inalienable human rights that must be defended. Each human owns their own body, and should never be legally bound to become the government’s property for forced injections or experimentation.

Vaccines cause severe health problems; even the kangaroo court system set up by the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program cannot keep up with the increase in cases of realized vaccine damage. Thousands of cases of such damage are dismissed by the court, and in spite of this, over 3 billion in select payoffs have been issued to vaccine injured families since the court was established. (The court basically functions to give vaccine manufacturers immunity from judicial accountability.)

CDC wants to hear from you

The CDC wants to hear from you about their proposed power trip rule. This is an excellent opportunity to tell the agency exactly how nefarious and overreaching their new proposal is.

If the CDC takes on these new powers, all they will need is for the media to build up enough public fear against some new strain of virus, for a new vaccine to be introduced and forced on the public. Anyone who dares to ask questions or refuse could then be forcibly injected and jailed. As the proposal reveals, “… individuals who violate the terms of the agreement or the terms of the Federal order for quarantine, isolation, or conditional release (even if no agreement is in place between the individual and the government), he or she may be subject to criminal penalties.”

Coordinated vaccine compliance plot unveiled

Be aware that there is a coordinated, global effort to indoctrinate and force people into vaccine and pharmaceutical obedience. You are not only viewed as a subject without rights, but according to internal WHO documents, you are viewed as an adversary who needs to be psychologically manipulated into believing in vaccine “science.” If this new CDC rule goes through, it’s not unrealistic to assume that any information you give out as you declare your opposition to forced injections could be used in the future to track you down and inject you against your will.

If this course of action sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of the medical experimentation that was forced on Jews during the holocaust. When the Nazis claimed ownership over Jewish people’s bodies they eventually used police state power to round them up and do whatever they wanted with them in the camps. In essence, the CDC’s new rule gives the government authority to incarcerate Americans en masse, relocating them to camps to be medically experimented on with vaccines and other pharmaceutical products.

CDC doing away with informed consent

Personal protection (by whatever means) has never been more important, as the CDC accelerates this same type of Nazi ideology by claiming ownership over your body. Furthermore, it wouldn’t be hard to unleash a United Nations global police force into neighborhoods to round up vaccine dissenters. If the government claims ownership over your body, and has the military power to do whatever they want, people will take orders and do their jobs, no questions asked. As the document states,”When an apprehension occurs, the individual is not free to leave or discontinue his/her discussion with an HHS/CDC public health or quarantine officer.”

Finally, the document reveals that the CDC is doing away with informed consent altogether, (even though the American Medical Association still upholds it): “CDC may enter into an agreement with an individual, upon such terms as the CDC considers to be reasonably necessary, indicating that the individual consents to any of the public health measures authorized under this part, including quarantine, isolation, conditional release, medical examination, hospitalization, vaccination, and treatment; provided that the individual’s consent shall not be considered as a prerequisite to any exercise of any authority under this part.”

What concerns me the most is the fact that so many American’s today are so brain washed they will let any one with authority do anything they want. It would never occur to people that their body is theirs to do with as they see fit. They are dumbed down so much they obey anything and everything. As for me and my house they can have our dead bodies along with those storm troopers who demand compliance at the barrel of a gun.

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“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” ― Edward R. Murrow

We’ve walked a strange and harrowing road since September 11, 2001, littered with the debris of our once-vaunted liberties.

We have gone from a nation that took great pride in being a model of a representative democracy to being a model of how to persuade the citizenry to march in lockstep with a police state. In doing so, we have proven Osama Bin Laden right. He warned that “freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life.”

These past 15 years have indeed been an unbearable, choking hell.

What began with the passage of the USA Patriot Act in October 2001 has snowballed into the eradication of every vital safeguard against government overreach, corruption and abuse.

The citizenry’s unquestioning acquiescence to anything the government wants to do in exchange for the phantom promise of safety and security has resulted in a society where the nation is being locked down into a militarized, mechanized, hypersensitive, legalistic, self-righteous, goose-stepping antithesis of every principle upon which this nation was founded.

This is not freedom. This is a jail cell.

Set against a backdrop of government surveillance, militarized police, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, eminent domain, overcriminalization, armed surveillance drones, whole body scanners, stop and frisk searches, roving VIPR raids and the like—all of which have been sanctioned by Congress, the White House and the courts—our constitutional freedoms have been steadily chipped away at, undermined, eroded, whittled down, and generally discarded.

Our losses are mounting with every passing day.

Free speech, the right to protest, the right to challenge government wrongdoing, due process, a presumption of innocence, the right to self-defense, accountability and transparency in government, privacy, press, sovereignty, assembly, bodily integrity, representative government: all of these and more have become casualties in the government’s war on the American people, a war that has grown more pronounced since 9/11.

Since the towers fell on 9/11, the American people have been treated like enemy combatants, to be spied on, tracked, scanned, frisked, searched, subjected to all manner of intrusions, intimidated, invaded, raided, manhandled, censored, silenced, shot at, locked up, and denied due process.

In allowing ourselves to be distracted by terror drills, foreign wars, color-coded warnings, underwear bombers and other carefully constructed exercises in propaganda, sleight of hand, and obfuscation, we failed to recognize that the true enemy to freedom was lurking among us all the while.

The U.S. government now poses a greater threat to our freedoms than any terrorist, extremist or foreign entity ever could.

While nearly 3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government and its agents have easily killed at least ten times that number of civilians in the U.S. and abroad since 9/11 through its police shootings, SWAT team raids, drone strikes and profit-driven efforts to police the globe, sell weapons to foreign nations, and foment civil unrest in order to keep the military industrial complex gainfully employed. (Syria’s bloody civil war in which CIA-armed militias have been fighting FBI-armed militias is a prime example of the government’s Machiavellian schemes gone awry.)

No, the U.S. government is not the citizenry’s friend, nor is it our protector, and life in the United States of America post-9/11 is no picnic.

Here’s an A-to-Z primer to spell out exactly what government tyranny means post 9/11.

A is for the AMERICAN POLICE STATE. A police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

B is for our battered BILL OF RIGHTS. In the cop culture that is America today, where you can be kicked, punched, tasered, shot, intimidated, harassed, stripped, searched, brutalized, terrorized, wrongfully arrested, and even killed by a police officer, and that officer is rarely held accountable for violating your rights, the Bill of Rights doesn’t amount to much.

D is for DRONES. It is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be airborne in American airspace by 2020, part of an $80 billion industry. Although some drones will be used for benevolent purposes, many will also be equipped with lasers, tasers and scanning devices, among other weapons—all aimed at “we the people.”

E is for ELECTRONIC CONCENTRATION CAMP. In the electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state, all aspects of a person’s life are policed by government agents and all citizens are suspects, their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.

F is for FUSION CENTERS. Fusion centers, data collecting agencies spread throughout the country and aided by the National Security Agency, serve as a clearinghouse for information shared between state, local and federal agencies. These fusion centers constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails. This data is then fed to government agencies, which are now interconnected: the CIA to the FBI, the FBI to local police.

G is for GRENADE LAUNCHERS and GLOBAL POLICE. The federal government has distributed more than $18 billion worth of battlefield-appropriate military weapons, vehicles and equipment such as drones, tanks, and grenade launchers to domestic police departments across the country. As a result, most small-town police forces now have enough firepower to render any citizen resistance futile. Now take those small-town police forces, train them to look and act like the military, and then enlist them to be part of the United Nations’ Strong Cities Network program, and you not only have a standing army that operates beyond the reach of the Constitution but one that is part of a global police force.

H is for HOLLOW-POINT BULLETS. The government’s efforts to militarize and weaponize its agencies and employees is reaching epic proportions, with federal agencies as varied as the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration stockpiling millions of lethal hollow-point bullets, which violate international law. Ironically, while the government continues to push for stricter gun laws for the general populace, the U.S. military’s arsenal of weapons makes the average American’s handgun look like a Tinker Toy.

I is for the INTERNET OF THINGS, in which internet-connected “things” will monitor your home, your health and your habits in order to keep your pantry stocked, your utilities regulated and your life under control and relatively worry-free. The key word here, however, is control. This “connected” industry propels us closer to a future where police agencies apprehend virtually anyone if the government “thinks” they may commit a crime, driverless cars populate the highways, and a person’s biometrics are constantly scanned and used to track their movements, target them for advertising, and keep them under perpetual surveillance.

J is for JAILING FOR PROFIT. Having outsourced their inmate population to private prisons run by private corporations, this profit-driven form of mass punishment has given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep their privately run prisons full by jailing large numbers of Americans for inane crimes.

K is for KENTUCKY V. KING. In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers can break into homes, without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home as long as they think they have a reason to do so. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by law enforcement officials.

M is for MAIN CORE. Since the 1980s, the U.S. government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation. As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. As of 2008, there were some 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

N is for NO-KNOCK RAIDS. Owing to the militarization of the nation’s police forces, SWAT teams are now increasingly being deployed for routine police matters. In fact, more than 80,000 of these paramilitary raids are carried out every year. That translates to more than 200 SWAT team raids every day in which police crash through doors, damage private property, terrorize adults and children alike, kill family pets, assault or shoot anyone that is perceived as threatening—and all in the pursuit of someone merely suspected of a crime, usually possession of some small amount of drugs.

O is for OVERCRIMINALIZATION. Thanks to an overabundance of 4500-plus federal crimes and 400,000 plus rules and regulations, it’s estimated that the average American actually commits three felonies a day without knowing it. As a result of this overcriminalization, we’re seeing an uptick in Americans being arrested and jailed for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room.

P is for PATHOCRACY and PRECRIME. When our own government treats us as things to be manipulated, maneuvered, mined for data, manhandled by police, mistreated, and then jailed in profit-driven private prisons if we dare step out of line, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.” Couple that with the government’s burgeoning precrime programs, which will use fusion centers, data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics in order to identify and deter so-called potential “extremists,” dissidents or rabble-rousers. Bear in mind that anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is now viewed as an extremist.

Q is for QUALIFIED IMMUNITY.Qualified immunity allows officers to walk away without paying a dime for their wrongdoing. Conveniently, those deciding whether a police officer should be immune from having to personally pay for misbehavior on the job all belong to the same system, all cronies with a vested interest in protecting the police and their infamous code of silence: city and county attorneys, police commissioners, city councils and judges.

R is for ROADSIDE STRIP SEARCHES and BLOOD DRAWS. The courts have increasingly erred on the side of giving government officials—especially the police—vast discretion in carrying out strip searches, blood draws and even anal probes for a broad range of violations, no matter how minor the offense. In the past, strip searches were resorted to only in exceptional circumstances where police were confident that a serious crime was in progress. In recent years, however, strip searches have become routine operating procedures in which everyone is rendered a suspect and, as such, is subjected to treatment once reserved for only the most serious of criminals.

S is for the SURVEILLANCE STATE. On any given day, the average American going about his daily business will be monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways, by both government and corporate eyes and ears. A byproduct of this new age in which we live, whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency, whether the NSA or some other entity, is listening in and tracking your behavior. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the corporate trackers that monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere.

T is for TASERS. Nonlethal weapons such as tasers, stun guns, rubber pellets and the like have been used by police as weapons of compliance more often and with less restraint—even against women and children—and in some instances, even causing death. These “nonlethal” weapons also enable police to aggress with the push of a button, making the potential for overblown confrontations over minor incidents that much more likely. A Taser Shockwave, for instance, can electrocute a crowd of people at the touch of a button.

V is for VIPR SQUADS. So-called “soft target” security inspections, carried out by roving VIPR task forces, comprised of federal air marshals, surface transportation security inspectors, transportation security officers, behavior detection officers and explosive detection canine teams, are taking place whenever and wherever the government deems appropriate, at random times and places, and without needing the justification of a particular threat.

W is for WHOLE-BODY SCANNERS. Using either x-ray radiation or radio waves, scanning devices and government mobile units are being used not only to “see” through your clothes but to spy on you within the privacy of your home. While these mobile scanners are being sold to the American public as necessary security and safety measures, we can ill afford to forget that such systems are rife with the potential for abuse, not only by government bureaucrats but by the technicians employed to operate them.

Y is for YOU-NESS. Using your face, mannerisms, social media and “you-ness” against you, you can now be tracked based on what you buy, where you go, what you do in public, and how you do what you do. Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in states all across the country.

Z is for ZERO TOLERANCE. We have moved into a new paradigm in which young people are increasingly viewed as suspects and treated as criminals by school officials and law enforcement alike, often for engaging in little more than childish behavior. In some jurisdictions, students have also been penalized under school zero tolerance policies for such inane “crimes” as carrying cough drops, wearing black lipstick, bringing nail clippers to school, using Listerine or Scope, and carrying fold-out combs that resemble switchblades. The lesson being taught to our youngest—and most impressionable—citizens is this: in the American police state, you’re either a prisoner (shackled, controlled, monitored, ordered about, limited in what you can do and say, your life not your own) or a prison bureaucrat (politician, police officer, judge, jailer, spy, profiteer, etc.).

We can live in the past, dwell on what freedoms we used to enjoy and shrug helplessly at the destruction of our liberties.

We can immerse ourselves in the present, allowing ourselves to be utterly distracted by the glut of entertainment news and ever-changing headlines so that we fail to pay attention to or do anything about the government’s ongoing power-grabs.

We can hang our hopes on the future, believing against all odds that someone or something—whether it be a politician, a movement, or a religious savior—will save us from inevitable ruin.

Or we can start right away by instituting changes at the local level, holding our government officials accountable to the rule of law, and resurrecting the Constitution, recognizing that if we fail to do so and instead follow our current trajectory, the picture of the future will be closer to what George Orwell likened to “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Very few people are aware of the system known as the ISDS, the existence of which threatens the very principle of national sovereignty – and even Democracy itself. The acronym stand for Investor-State Dispute Settlement, and it is part of every bad free trade deal passed since the 1990s. It is at the heart of the worst one of all, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, yet President Obama is still determined to shove it down our collective throats.

The ISDS system, which stands outside of a sovereign nation’s own judiciary, was put in place in order to provide a neutral platform for dispute resolution under international law – protecting citizens and preventing trade and business disputes from escalating into all-out war. For example, if Company X builds a factory in Kazakhstan, and the Kazakhstanian government seizes control of the facility or the company’s financial resources, Company X can go through the ISDS in order to sue that government (read about a specific case here).

The primary danger is that rulings made in such a court can supersede national law. A multinational corporation that doesn’t care for a country’s environmental regulations or rules on worker protection can sue the government, effectively overturning such laws. Worse, the hearings are conducted before a tribunal consisting of three private attorneys who frequently switch roles – acting as judge in one case, and representing corporations in another.

It’s not hard to figure out what happens next. When the corporation prevails, the government being sued must pay up. As of June 2015, lawsuits under this system has cost U.S. taxpayers $440 million. Most ISDS cases involve challenges again a country’s environmental laws, worker health and safety regulations, and national resource policies. During the first thirty years of the system’s existence, fewer than 50 such actions were filed. However, since the introduction of so many “free trade” deals, the number of ISDS lawsuits has exploded.

There is another reason for that increase that has opponents of the TPP greatly concerned. As it turns out, the ISDS is becoming yet another way for the 1% oligarchy to gamble by speculating on lawsuits. One way they do this is to purchase companies with a cause of action to bring an ISDS suit. These financiers are even known to set up shell companies for no other reason than to sue a government – then sit back and reap their ill-gotten gain. In many cases, they will even finance such a company’s lawsuit. In the past, this kind of third-party lawsuit funding was known as champerty and was illegal.

According to the website Public Citizen, if President Obama signs the TPP into law, as many as 9000 more multinational corporations will have the right to sue the U.S. government under a system that is secretive and corrupt – and it will accelerate the transfer of wealth away from those who actually work and produce into the pockets of a tiny, elite plutocracy.

Yet Mr. Obama, for all he has done to help average Americans, continues to insist that the treaty will “do even more to lower the costs of exporting, eliminating taxes and custom duties and raising intellectual property standards that protect data and ideas and jobs.” He fails to mention that it could (and likely will) cost American taxpayers billions of dollars, sending that money straight into the coffers of the 1%.

Although President Obama is encountering stiff resistance from Congress and both Clinton and Trump stand against the TPP, he could still push it through during the coming lame duck session. However, if he is to succeed, he will have to address a number of issues – not the least of which is the ISDS.

http://www.prosperousamerica.org/Obama Pushes For TPP As

Opponents Leverage Presidential Politics to Kill Trade Deal

Two presidential candidates oppose it. So does much of the American public. But President Barack Obama, having staked much of his foreign policy credibility on a “pivot to Asia,” shows all the signs of wanting to push a major trade deal through Congress after the November elections.

It may be quixotic; it will certainly be contentious. It may tear apart Democrats one more time over the issue of how much globalization is too much, while also testing the appetite of Republicans for splitting their own party now that Donald Trump has laid bare how much the rank-and-file loathe trade agreements.

The Obama administration completed negotiations on the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership nearly a year ago. Since then it has languished amid Republican quibbling with parts of the agreement and a presidential campaign season that has seen Trump and Hillary Clinton rail against it.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, have both demurred on the TPP, with McConnell going so far as to say there will be no vote this year. But the fog of election-year politics may be obscuring an impending fight during the lame-duck Congress.

“It’s impossible to tell before the election because nobody has any incentive to say anything other than whatever they’ve been saying,” said Bill Reinsch, a longtime business lobbyist and now a fellow at the Stimson Center. “After the election there will be a vote count, more people will answer honestly, and based on that they’ll either go forward or decide there’s not enough time.”

Yesterday, September 2, in the Three Days of Grace following September 1— the “Time of Resurrection” in the Year of Golden Jubilee— the actual States recorded Non-UCC liens against the bankrupt “State of_______________” organizations.

Those of you who have read “You Know Something Is Wrong When….An American Affidavit of Probable Cause” already know that a mostly foreign-owned corporate entity was formed under the agreements (treaties) ending the Revolutionary War and setting up the original “Constitution”.

The first company formed to “provide essential government services” under this arrangement was The United States (Trading Company) formed by a consortium of old colonial investment companies under the leadership of The Virginia Company. These mostly-British companies continued to provide the nineteen enumerated services stipulated in The Constitution for the united States of America until 1863 when this first version of “United States” was bankrupted by Lincoln.

The next corporate actor on the stage was The United States of America, born 1868. It took over as the service provider at the federal level in that year and published its corporate charter as the look-alike, sound-alike “constitution” called The Constitution of the United States of America.

This corporation was bankrupted and bought out by creditors in 1907 by a consortium of mostly-European banks calling itself “the Federal Reserve” which operated under the name “the United States of America” and the Constitution of the United States of America.

In 1933, FDR bankrupted the United States of America (Inc.) and all the “State of__________” franchisees “pledged” the “good faith and credit of their states and citizens thereof”. Millions upon millions of Americans were falsely presumed to be acting as “United States citizens” and were “attached” as sureties responsible for paying off the debts of this private, mostly foreign-owned corporation from 1933-1999.

Meantime, other service providers were named as successors to the service contract, and in 1944, the UNITED STATES (INC.) fronted by the International Monetary Fund, a French-chartered international banking cartel, began operations on our shores and opened up fifty STATE franchises.

These “STATE OF_____” franchises have created a multitude of Cestui Que Vie trusts named after living Americans and also “International Organizations” named after living Americans and used these as a means to attach and seize upon our assets—- our names, our patents, our copyrights, our land, our homes, our businesses, our very bodies— have been mischaracterized and our identities have been stolen so as to promote fraud and false claims in commerce against us.

In comments made July 4, 2016, President Obama expressed the hope that the Republic would finally prove to be “dead”.

Yesterday we proved that rumors of the Republic’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

With the UNITED STATES, INC. under liquidation and THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, INC. under Chapter 11, the federal side of the original equity contract was “vacated” last year, leaving international trustees — the United Nations— in charge. We protested and made new arrangements for new federal service providers, establishing new Sovereign Letters Patent and issuing a new Declaration of Joint Sovereignty, naming the Native American Nations our international agents for the American States.

This countered any claim that we were not internationally represented and also kept the original Constitution in full force and effect.

The entire aim of the IMF and the FEDERAL RESERVE and numerous other banking interests has been first to defraud and mischaracterize Americans as “United States Citizens” and/or “citizens of the United States” which most of us have never been, tax us and coerce us and charge us under false pretenses, and finally, at the end of the day, mount a “claim on abandonment”—– say that our States of the Union no longer exist, that we all agreed to give them everything in sight, voluntarily, in exchange for “benefits” that we also agreed to pay for.

But yesterday, we supposedly “dead” States of America — the actual States owed the land jurisdiction of this country and every piece of dirt and stick of wood and block of cement standing upon the soil— issued our counterclaim and liened the rats and their trustees up the wazoo.

You may use the attached list of States and file reference numbers to look up the Non-UCC Lien filed for your State of the Union.

You will notice that I am named as the Executor. This is because each Constitution is a Will and it requires an Executor to execute and enforce it. As Priority Creditors, we are claiming the land jurisdiction and assets we are owed and which are insured and must be held harmless from any bankruptcy or liquidation of the “federal” service providers. The Remainder-man States on the land which were released from bankruptcy in 1999 have been re-populated by the grandsons of men who were in turn “grandfathered” into the protections of the original Constitution.

Each one of these men has formally expatriated from any presumption of “United States Citizenship” or being a “citizen of the United States”.

Check. Checkmate.

We are not going to endure another round of fraudulent involvement in foreign corporate bankruptcies. We are not going to put up with having foreign commercial mercenary armies operating under color of law on our soil. We are not assuming any debts or paying for any services beyond those which our states actually ordered. And no, we don’t care what happens to the “Federal Reserve” or the “IMF” or the “World Bank” or the “IBRD” or any of these other criminal banking cartels. We and our States of the Union are not their sureties, not their “citizens” and not their chattel.

We are their erstwhile employers, who have been grossly misrepresented, mischaracterized, and defrauded by our own employees.

It is time for this whole con job to end, the odious debts to be discharged, and all Americans to seize back their true identities.

The banking cartels were formed as corporations in order to avoid accountability for their actions. They have breached their charters and breached the public trust and operated as criminal cartels involved in inland piracy, racketeering, unlawful conversion, enslavement, human trafficking, gross fraud based on semantic deceit and more. These institutions deserve to go down in infamy, to be routed out, exposed, and liquidated for the benefit of humanity.

The media and education monopolies which have played footsie with these false “governments” need to be broken up and their assets sold off to American —not foreign interests. Only fools or traitors let foreigners establish monopolies and issue private scripts instead of public money. Only fools or traitors allow foreign corporations to dominate the American airwaves and buy up all the American newspapers, television and radio outlets. Only fools or traitors allow foreign corporations to control public education in America and dominate our universities. Only fools or traitors allow our public courts to be replaced with private courts operating as bill collectors for these same banks and corporations.

What all this adds up to is an attempt by certain parties to return to the days of Feudalism, supported by a virulent form of Commercial Colonialism and criminality that has pillaged humanity since before the Flood.

Now you finally have the chance to recognize it for what it is and put an end to it.

There is a separate list of the fifty state filings to be posted yet. It was sent out first as an email attachment.

This action puts an end to any hope or expectation that the banks could succeed in claiming that the land assets of America were “abandoned” by the actual owners and therefore available for seizure by secondary creditors — the banks themselves, the perpetrators of all this fraud against the Americans and virtually everyone else, too.

Having set up the UNITED STATES for liquidation and having placed THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA in Chapter 11 the rats figured they could wash their hands and nobody else— certainly not the victims of this fraud— would speak up and claim back the assets owed the actual states and people.

They thought they would make their false claim of “abandonment” and secure a legal claim on abandonment and use their commercial mercenary armies disguised as legitimate agencies of government to come in here and seize our property— and nobody would be the wiser.

But guess what?

There are now fifty liens against all the land assets of the fifty states and very plain words recorded in the international record.

We aren’t dead or asleep after all. We aren’t putting up with this garbage, criminality, and Breach of Trust anymore. We are done paying debts we don’t owe for the enrichment of con artists who have been bilking the entire world.

We hear that Jacob Rothschild has a personal fortune of 500 trillion dollars. Now you know how he got it. And you also know that it is all nothing but paper and lies and the fruit of labor and assets belonging to others and to their sons and daughters who have been mischaracterized by these bankers and cheated and defrauded and murdered by the billions by these freaks.

And for what? Digits on a ledger.

Go to the nearest computer and type in “500” and then thirteen zeroes after that. See that number?

That number represents the billions of lives ruined, lost, maimed, spent in needless poverty, sickness, forced labor, ignorance, and want. It represents every wounded and dying soldier from 780 AD onward.

It is a representation of just part of what these demons have stolen from humanity.

And it is NOT just Jacob Rothschild responsible. In the barrel of rotten banker apples he may be the wealthiest but he is far from the worst.

The time has come to realize just how badly you have been treated, how completely you have been deluded. Wake up! You have traded everything worthwhile in life for worthless pieces of paper and numbers on a ledger kept by thieves and con men.

No wonder they are laughing and cutting deals “in your behalf” and calling you “livestock” and planning to slaughter their creditors— you and your families— to avoid paying back what they owe you all. Wake up!

You have got to wake up now. You must tell your brothers and sisters throughout the world. You must bring forward your claims and make them stick. You must hold the bankers and politicians and members of the Bar Assiciations accountable for this.

And the Roman Pontiff, too. Take an interest and lend a hand. Expose the rats. Do it now.

Many of the younger generation must be truly bewildered over the emotions older Americans display when expressing love, devotion, respect and reverence for our country. A tear in the eye for a patriotic song… a hand over the heart as the national anthem plays… a salute to the flag as it passes in a parade. Why would we older folks do that?

What frame of reference could younger Americans possibly have? Patriotism, nationalism – even American citizenship are taboo in today’s school curriculum. Globalism, diversity, and political correctness trump real history, sound economics, and science. Communism is just another economic system. The Founding Fathers are simply old, dead slave-owning white guys. The UN’s Declaration on Human Rights trumps the Declaration of Independence.

Where are the heroes for today’s young people to admire? Principled leaders who understood the roots of America’s greatness now are replaced by blow-dried sound-byte kings whose professional campaign staffs understand only how to maneuver a special interest group or a voting block.

How can young people make decisions in the voting booth? Who can they choose? Are there any candidates who offer anything other than meaningless gibberish? If today’s young people could learn some of the history that brings the older generation a sense of pride then they could be helped to understand that ordinary people in history knew that there were life principles worth sacrificing or even dying for. Perhaps they could help demand a better future for themselves.

Here are three little known examples from three separate eras of our nation’s history which demonstrate how Americans once thought. They are examples of how we as a nation once stood proud, ready to defend ideals to the death if necessary. And these examples clearly show why the rest of the world understood that such unwavering devotion to those ideals meant our word was true. Our steadfast principles of freedom clearly showed the rest of the world that America offered the human race something different, something wonderful. Our unmatched freedoms meant that Americans were more secure, more prosperous and happier than any people in history.

Perhaps, through the following examples, today’s young Americans will understand that the tear in an eye or the hand over a heart expressed by the older generation wasn’t for a flag or a song. That show of emotion is really for the brave actions taken by the men and women which resulted in making the flags and the songs symbols of freedom.

Thomas Nelson, Jr.

Thomas Nelson, Jr. was born and raised in a wealthy family in Yorktown, Virginia. Educated in England, he was elected to the House of Burgesses in 1761. He loved everything British and was proud to be a British subject. That is until King George decided that his American subjects were good for little more than a revenue source to pay for his wars with France. The King imposed the hated Stamp Act on the American colonies and Nelson became a dedicated opponent. He believed he had rights to his own hard-earned money and he believed it was wrong to impose the tax when he had virtually no say in the matter. Such was the foundation of the American Revolution. It mattered.

Soon Nelson was elected to represent Virginia in the Continental Congress where he became one of fifty-six men to sign the Declaration of Independence. By adding his name to the bottom of the document he pledged his life, fortune and sacred honor. In other words Nelson and his fifty-five colleagues gambled everything in exchange for the ability to live their lives in freedom.

Thomas Nelson, Jr. backed up that pledge by becoming a brigadier general in George Washington’s army. But he did more than just fight. He used his own fortune to help Washington fund the army. His money helped make payrolls for the men who needed it for their families back home. His contributions to help keep the army on the battlefield would have equaled $2 million today.

Finally, in the last battle of the war Nelson found himself commanding troops outside his own hometown of Yorktown. As Washington laid siege to the British-held town, Nelson watched as a cannon battery continually missed an important target. It was British General Cornwallis’ command post. Nelson inquired of the troops why they weren’t shooting at the house. “Because,” they said, “it’s your house.” Nelson said, “give me the torch.” He then fired the first cannon aimed at his own home and gave the order for the other cannon to fire at the target as well. The home was destroyed. Not long after, Cornwallis surrendered and the United States was born.

For his service, Nelson died a pauper as his health and fortune were wrecked by the war. Thomas Nelson, Jr. made the sacrifice because he believed freedom was more important than comfort and material wealth. He was not alone as almost all signers of the Declaration of Independence met similar fates. Some died in the war effort. Many lost their fortunes. Some even lost their “sacred honor.” They did it so that future generations might live a better life.

Francis Scott Key

Most young people today think of the Star Spangled Banner as simply a hard song to sing before sporting events. To them, its curious words about bombs bursting in air and flags flying just sound like a Fourth of July party. Where’s the beer? Play ball.

But the words mean much more. The song’s lyrics are actually a testimony to sacrifice, death and courage. Francis Scott Key personally witnessed the events described in the song and wrote what he saw as it was happening.

Key was an attorney who lived in Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812. Again the United States was at war with Great Britain. The British had never really gotten over losing the American colonies. In the 20 years since Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown, they had continually harassed American ships on the high seas. The U.S. tried diplomacy to solve the problems as the country sought to freely and honestly trade with both England and France. Peace was the goal of the young nation.

But American ships seeking trade with Europe faced blockades by the British, who dominated the seas with their vast fleet, the largest in the world. In addition to preventing trade, the British claimed the right to take their sailors off the American ships. The problem was, they also took American sailors, making them serve against their will on British ships. Finally, the Americans had enough. Diplomacy wasn’t working. American lives and freedoms were being threatened. So the U.S. Government declared war on the British, again. It didn’t go well for the Americans. The British used their vast sea power to attack the United States. First the fleet sailed up the Hudson River to control New York. They launched an attack on New Orleans, gaining control of the Mississippi. And then they sailed up the Chesapeake, into the Potomac to invade Washington D.C. With little resistance, the British ransacked the Capital city, burning buildings, including the White House. First Lady Dolly Madison was able to escape with little more than the Declaration of Independence. As the Americans were forced to flee, the British fleet set its sights on the next target, one of the nation’s most prosperous cities, Baltimore – just a short trip up the Chesapeake. It was meant to be the final victory before reestablishing the Americans as British subjects.

Meanwhile, as the ships wreaked havoc from the sea, British troops were on the ground in countless towns and villages, arresting American citizens and putting them in makeshift jails or on prison ships. The Americans were not happy having these occupying troops in their communities and tried to fight back. In the small community of Upper Marlborough, Maryland two drunken British soldiers were arrested by Dr. William Beanes and thrown into jail. One escaped, caught up to his unit and reported what had happened. The British returned to the town, released their soldier and arrested Dr. Beanes.

Enter Francis Scott Key. The people of Upper Marlborough enlisted Key to help free Dr. Beanes who was now being held in the hold of a prison ship in Baltimore harbor. Key was allowed on the ship and taken to the prison hold. There he found the ship packed with American prisoners, including Beanes. Key met with Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn to negotiate a prisoner exchange in hopes of freeing all of the Americas. At first Cockburn agreed and Key went below to tell the men they would soon be released.

As the two men met on the deck of the ship, Cockburn told him that, yes the men would soon be released, but not through a prisoner exchange. They would be released, he said, because the war will be over. Then Cockburn pointed down the bay where Key saw hundreds of British ships sailing toward them. “That,” said Cockburn, “is the entire British fleet. They are coming here to take Fort McHenry.” The fort was the last strong hold of the Americans and it protected Baltimore. Its fall would assure the final British victory and the end of the United States.

Key was held on the ship, unable to leave until the battle was over. The bombardment began at dusk in a deafening roar of cannon fire from a hundred ships which stayed outside the range of Fort McHenry’s guns. As the fleet opened fire on the fort, the men held in chains below deck wanted to know what was happening. Key reported what he saw throughout the battle.

Waving from the fort was a large American flag. As night began to fall, the bombs from the British fleet burst through the air. The last thing anyone could see in the twilight’s last gleaming was the flag defiantly flying over the fort. Throughout the night the prisoners called out, “is it still flying.” No matter how many bombs seemed to hit the flag, it continued to fly. Finally, in frustration, the British fleet trained all of its guns on the flag, determined to bring it and the American’s defiance down in a heap. Still it flew.

In the morning the guns stopped. In the dawn’s early light all saw that the flag still flew and the fort remained in American hands. Eventually, the fleet sailed away. Key was released. According to some reports, Key rushed to the fort and there he saw what had happened. The flagpole, say the reports, had been hit numerous times. Some have reported that around the base of the flag were numerous bodies of American soldiers and citizens. Throughout the night, it is said, they had sacrificed themselves to keep the flag waving. As the flagpole splintered from the direct hits it suffered, men rushed out and held up the flag, becoming human flagpoles. One by one, as each was cut down by the bombs bursting in air, another rushed out to take his place.

The nation survived and America became a shining symbol to the world as the land of the free. And the men of Fort McHenry proved it was also the home of the brave.

William Barret Travis

In the winter and early spring of 1836, war raged throughout what is now the State of Texas. Mexico, led by General Santa Anna wanted to control the territory. Santa Anna was a pompous, brutal dictator who had terrorized the citizens, murdering at will, and taking property at his whim. The Texans wanted to be free of him. In a recent battle they had managed to free the town of San Antonio of his rule. Now he wanted it back.

So, Santa Anna began a march on San Antonio with more that 1,000 troops, determined to prove that resistance to his rule was futile. On February 23rd, about 145 Texans under the command of William Barret Travis rushed into a mission called the Alamo. Soon they were surrounded. Travis put out a call for reinforcements, saying, “I am besieged by a thousand or more Mexicans… I have sustained a continual bombardment and cannonade for 24 hours… The enemy has demanded a surrender at discretion, otherwise the garrison are to be put to the sword if the fort is taken.”

Over the following two weeks, the Mexican forces continually strengthened to over 2,000. Answering Travis’s call, a few reinforcements for the Texans were able to break through the lines and build the garrison to 189. Famed frontiersman and former Congressman Davy Crockett arrived with 15 good men from Tennessee. Another famous frontiersman, Jim Bowie was there. There were 30 volunteers from South Carolina, ready to fight with their native son, Travis. More than 81 volunteers were from different countries including England, Scotland, Germany, Ireland and various U.S. states.

Finally, as it became apparent that no large group of reinforcements would be able to come to their aid, Travis called a meeting of the men and told them they were free to leave and save themselves. He took out his sword and drew a line in the sand. He said, if you choose to stay, cross that line. To a man they crossed, determined to stay and fight the Santa Anna tyranny.

After constant bombardment from the Mexican guns, the men inside the Alamo heard a certain bugle signal. It was the command to Santa Anna’s troops to charge and take no prisoners. The men in the Alamo fought to the last man. Travis was one of the first to fall, on the north wall where the main assault occurred. He was 26. Jim Bowie, ill on a stretcher, was killed in a small room on the south side. He was 41. And Davy Crockett’s body was found in a small fort on the west side, surrounded by a pile of dead Mexicans. He was 50 years old.

189 Texans died that day but they took 600 Mexicans with them. The Alamo had fallen, but their courage allowed Texas General Sam Houston the time he needed to raise an army and meet Santa Anna only forty six days later. As Houston’s men charged, they shouted, “Remember the Alamo.” The battle lasted only 18 minutes. The Texans killed 630 of Santa Anna’s men, and captured 730, literally destroying his army. The next day, General Santa Anna was captured, disguised as a peasant. His rule was finished and Texas had won its independence, because 189 heroes had offered their lives in a belief that preserving freedom was more important than living life under tyranny.

Making Sense Of It All

American history is full of stories of sacrifice and heroism in the name of preserving freedom. They were called patriots and they didn’t sacrifice to build the power of government, or to enrich the pockets of a select power elite or to promote one group over another. They did it so they could live their lives in peace, unencumbered and left alone.

Today, our young people are taught in government classrooms that these ideals are old fashioned, quaint and, in many cases just plain wrong. Patriotism is racism, we’re told by modern scholars. Property ownership is selfish, a social injustice. Children are taught that our free society is the root of the Earth’s destruction and must be dismantled through a tightly controlled, organized global village. The Constitution, say some the scholars, is a living document, changeable on a whim. The Declaration of Independence, which Dolly Madison risked everything to save, is just a “war document from the Revolution.” Nothing more.

Yesterday’s patriots have been replaced by politicians who pander to special interests, as they fill their pockets with money in exchange for deals, privilege and power. A foreign policy based on honest trade, avoiding “entangling alliances,” has been replaced with our military meddling in over one hundred countries, as we impose economic and personal values where they aren’t wanted. America today is guilty of the very same kind of “nation building” we fought King George to end. Now America finds itself hated and non-respected, assuring American citizens are unsafe on every street corner in the world.

Politicians

America needs leadership which understands and reveres our roots and the history it took to mold this nation. But who can our young people look to for such ideas? Who among the politicians and self-appointed leaders of our nation would make such sacrifices? Who among them would even advocate such an attitude?

Would Hillary Clinton stand on the front lines in defense of this nation and order her own home destroyed for freedom’s sake? Would Barack Obama stand on the North wall and fight to the death to stop an invasion of the country? Of course not. In fact, both of these “leaders” have actually thrown open the door of Fortress America and are calling for those very descendents of the original invaders of the Alamo to “come on over.” William Travis would have shot them.

Today, instead of statesmen who serve our country out of love and loyalty for its ideals; or leaders who deal with other nations under the guideline of “does it serve the just interest of the United States”, we have politicians looking for a deal. Will it sound good to a certain voter block? Will it make me look good on television? Can I get a leg up on the other candidates if I propose this?

Today’s politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders propose vast policy programs costing billions of dollars with no concern of where the money is coming from. They grab private land, displace families and regulate private business out of existence in the name of social justice. Meanwhile, House Speaker John Boehner, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the ones we count on to stand in defense of our Constitutional system, join right in, refusing to take action to even slow down the growth and cost of these massive government schemes.

What are the real issues on the minds of the American public? Too-high taxes; ever-creeping government intrusion in our lives; unprotected borders; over 60% say they want us out of the UN; growing corporate power; reduced standard of living; the fall of the dollar and less buying power; massive government debt; high energy prices. These issues affect every single American and we want someone to speak for us.

Yet not one of these issues is being addressed by most of the candidates for president. Instead we have great debates on the so called “War on Women,” racial disparity, and whether or not Donald Trump is too mean to run for president. Each of these issues is a hot button for specific special interest groups which are piling money into campaign coffers. The average American could care less about any of them, yet these are the debates of the day while the real issues are ignored.

Instead of addressing real issues, political campaigns have become little more than an exercise in character assassination of opponents in an attempt to get a leg up in the public. The mainstream news media has become the lap dog for the big government ideology.

These politicians would never be trusted on the front lines next to the heroes of the Alamo or Thomas Nelson, Jr. None would ever inspire a single lyric by Key. And they are not worthy of being elected to lead the country these heroes helped create.

Patriots

But there are still patriots in our nation who are fighting a desperate fight to preserve our freedoms. Some are just citizens who see the wrongs and take local action to fight them. They show up at city council and county commission meetings to express their opposition to policies that affect property and taxes and quality of life. They work tirelessly, producing materials, working in political campaigns, and getting in front of microphones wherever they can. Though just an unorganized, unfunded rag tag band, these freedom fighters are beginning to make an impact and the big government forces are starting to nervously take notice.

Some of the best I’ve had the privilege to work with – to name just a tiny few, include Sheriff Richard Mack, who travels the nation teaching county sheriffs that they are the first line of defense against an oppressive central government. KrisAnne Hall, who travels over 265 days a year to teach Americans the power and justice of the Constitution. Pastor Chuck Baldwin, whose writings demand we think with common sense. And John Anthony, who is one of the very best in teaching local residents how to deal with invading planners as they attempt to transform our communities into socialist utopias.

Others decide to take the big step of running for office. Perhaps they were just local activists to start with, but decided that the cause needed elected representatives that can really make a difference from the inside. In the past couple of years, barely a week goes by without my hearing from new, dedicated representatives who ask me what they can do to take effective action to stop the growing tyranny.

Again, I’ve had the great privilege to not only work with some of these great patriots, but to call them my friend. One of the very first to stand, unwavering against the massive growth and corruption of local government is Carroll County, Maryland Commissioner Richard Rothschild. Even as he is attacked in the news media and falsely labeled a danger to the future of his community, he stands, many times alone, for the principles of freedom. As powerful forces work to remove him, he stands, like Travis on the wall, and refuses to back down.

In the state legislature of Washington stands Representative Matt Shea. In one of the most liberal states in the Union, Rep. Shea has organized a Freedom Team of legislators to fight for limited government and the ideals of freedom. In the past two sessions they have introduced over 100 bills, all aimed at limiting the size, cost, reach and power of government. They have managed to pass about thirty of these into law. Matt Shea and Richard Rothschild are the models for us all. And they are unwavering patriots.

There are many others, in every state, who are beginning to make their efforts felt in the cause to preserve freedom. They understand that private property ownership is the key to prosperity. They had seen that the more powerful the government control, the more corruption, and that it is government itself that must be controlled. And they are becoming a growing force. Their courage is an inspiration.

Matt Shea would order the destruction of his own home if it meant one American would be free. Richard Rothschild would stand on that wall of the Alamo to the last. He already has in our modern day fight. And Kris Anne Hall would sing the glory of the heroes of Fort McHenry. She does it every day.

As your children seek to understand why we older folks get a tear in our eye and a swell of pride in hearts as we hear the songs and see the flags flying – symbols of the incredible sacrifice so many suffered just to defend our freedom – they need look no further than these modern day heroes. Patriots still exist among us and they are still fighting the same tyranny as our Founders, and for the same reasons. We should all stand together so that our children and our children’s children will have a life of their own choosing. It’s that simple.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS!

When I hear or read the word patriot, I remember the time when I felt like Tom has described above, but now that I am no longer ignorant of how Americans have been brain washed and the atrocities we have committed in the name of patriotism, I feel sorry for those who still feel compelled to follow the orders of psychopaths. Take this to the bank folks, the only people who deserve to die are the ones you are worshipping, and their Masters; the International Investment Central Banking Cartel.THEY ARE THE SCUM OF THE EARTH! Of course I do justify murder as in self defense, and any intelligent and informed person would conclude that the very people who we are allowing to establish our laws and enforce them are also our enemies. And the only loyalty they have is to the Cartel. Where do you think all the billions of dollars go too besides these bastards who pretend to be our leaders? It cost the Cartel huge amounts of money to have so many loyal employees. If you are a cop, you’re so ignorant you don’t even know who you are really WORKING FOR. Read and learn folks, before you commit your life to tyrants. All of your good intentions are proof you are brain washed. In reality, the America we loved so much was a damn lie. It’s the biggest con in history. It’s like loving a wife who is a whore behind your back. While you work your ass off to give her all the things she wants, she’s screwing your friends and salting the money away. Good intentions without knowledge is like a limp dick.

Do you smirk when you hear someone question the official stories of Orlando, San Bernardino, Paris or Nice? Do you feel superior to 2,500 architects and engineers, to firefighters, commercial and military pilots, physicists and chemists, and former high government officials who have raised doubts about 9/11? If so, you reflect the profile of a mind-controlled CIA stooge.

The term “conspiracy theory” was invented and put into public discourse by the CIA in 1964 in order to discredit the many skeptics who challenged the Warren Commission’s conclusion that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald, who himself was assassinated while in police custody before he could be questioned. The CIA used its friends in the media to launch a campaign to make suspicion of the Warren Commission report a target of ridicule and hostility. This campaign was “one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”

So writes political science professor Lance deHaven-Smith, who in his peer-reviewed book, Conspiracy Theory in America, published by the University of Texas Press, tells the story of how the CIA succeeded in creating in the public mind reflexive, automatic, stigmatization of those who challenge government explanations. This is an extremely important and readable book, one of those rare books with the power to break you out of The Matrix.

Professor deHaven-Smith is able to write this book because the original CIA Dispatch #1035-960, which sets out the CIA plot, was obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Apparently, the bureaucracy did not regard a document this old as being of any importance. The document is marked “Destroy when no longer needed,” but somehow wasn’t. CIA Dispatch #1035-960 is reproduced in the book.

The success that the CIA has had in stigmatizing skepticism of government explanations has made it difficult to investigate State Crimes Against Democracy (SCAD) such as 9/11. With the public mind programmed to ridicule “conspiracy kooks,” even in the case of suspicious events such as 9/11 the government can destroy evidence, ignore prescribed procedures, delay an investigation, and then form a political committee to put its imprimatur on the official story. Professor deHaven-Smith notes that in such events as Kennedy’s assassination and 9/11 official police and prosecutorial investigations are never employed. The event is handed off to a political commission.

Professor deHaven-Smith’s book supports what I have told my readers: the government controls the story from the beginning by having the official explanation ready the moment a SCAD occurs. This makes any other explanation a “conspiracy theory.” This is the way Professor deHaven-Smith puts it:

“A SCAD approach to memes assumes further that the CIA and other possibly participating agencies are formulating memes well in advance of operations, and therefore SCAD memes appear and are popularized very quickly before any competing concepts are on the scene.”

The CIA’s success in controlling public perception of what our Founding Fathers would have regarded as suspicious events involving the government enables those in power positions within government to orchestrate events that serve hidden agendas. The events of September 11 created the new paradigm of endless war in behalf of a Washington-dominated world. The CIA’s success in controlling public perceptions has made it impossible to investigate elite political crimes. Consequently, it is now possible for treason to be official US government policy.

Professor deHaven-Smith’s book will tell you the story of the assassination of President Kennedy by elements of the US military, CIA, and Secret Service. Just as the Warren Commission covered up the State Crime Against Democracy, Professor deHaven-Smith shows why we should doubt the official 9/11 story. And anything else that the government tells us.

Read this book. It is short. It is affordable. It is reality preparation. It will innoculate you against being a dumbshit, insouciant, brainwashed American. I am surprised that the CIA has not purchased the entire print run and burned the books. Perhaps the CIA feels secure from its success in brainwashing the public and does not believe that American democracy and accountable government can be restored.

Again, thanks to OBAMA, he has or is giving away control of the Internet, and the one’s who might just take over control, are the United Nations. Thats right, Our fearless cocksucker in chief has yet again fucked every American over.

When the Obama administration announced its plan to give up U.S. protection of the internet, it promised the United Nations would never take control. But because of the administration’s naiveté or arrogance, U.N. control is the likely result if the U.S. gives up internet stewardship as planned at midnight on Sept. 30.

Without the U.S. contract, ICAAN would seek to be overseen by another governmental group so as to keep its antitrust exemption. Authoritarian regimes have already proposed ICAAN become part of the U.N. to make it easier for them to censor the internet globally. So much for the Obama pledge that the U.S. would never be replaced by a “government-led or an inter-governmental organization solution.” The only thing worse than a monopoly overseen by the U.S. government is a monopoly overseen by no one—or by a Web-censoring U.N. Congress still has time to extend its ban on the Obama administration giving up protection of the internet. ICAAN has given it every reason to do so.

SAME TO YA ASSHOLE!

This is something that should inspire the military to throw this bastard in the ocean from 30K feet!

If everyone does not raise living hell

TODAY

America is toast!!! And the people deserve it.

Call your fucking congress critter and raise hell, over and over until the bastards cut you off.

Since most people are infatuated with Professional Sports and have little intellect with which to think critically, it has been my intention to put before you a variety of subjects that are affecting the demise of our freedom from a tyrannical Government, and our ability to perceive what is being done to us on a personal and financial level. In the end I can only pray that you will wake up to these atrocities and get involved in spreading the truth about our National and State Governments and certain rich people like George Soros. The education, and mainstream media has retarded your understanding of human nature and you must abandon your fixation on American exceptionalism if you are ever to regain your freedom, safety and peace of mind. It is your personal responsibility to learn and teach by spreading the word. Or you can bend over and kiss your ass goodbye!

ROMA, TX – APRIL 14: A Border Patrol agent speaks with Central American immigrant families who crossed into the United States seeking asylum on April 14, 2016 in Roma, Texas. Border security and immigration, both legal and otherwise, continue to be contentious national issues in the 2016 Presidential campaign. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

By Peter Hasson

ROMA, TX – APRIL 14: A Border Patrol agent speaks with Central American immigrant families who crossed into the United States seeking asylum on April 14, 2016 in Roma, Texas. Border security and immigration, both legal and otherwise, continue to be contentious national issues in the 2016 Presidential campaign. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

George Soros’s Open Society Foundations is anticipating an increase in “migration pressures in the coming decades” due in part to “globalization,” according to a leaked memo outlining a proposed strategy for successfully influencing immigration policy.

The memo, which was published by “hacktivist” group DCLeaks, contains a proposed strategy for OSF’s International Migration Initiative, which aims to influence global immigration policy. The proposed strategy previews the organization’s work from 2016 to 2019.

“IMI’s work on migration is set against a volatile backdrop. More people than ever before are crossing borders in search of safety and a better life, while in nearly every region xenophobia, populism, and hostility towards migrants are on the rise,” notes the memo.

“In some contexts, governments manage migration through guest worker programs that restrict migrants’ rights by tying them to short-term jobs, satisfying business demand for cheap labor while also appeasing anti-migrant sentiment. Elsewhere, governments pursue policies of deterrence and enforcement designed to keep migrants out. IMI’s work responds to both trends.”

“The fierce opposition to immigration reforms in the US and Europe, rising numbers of deaths in the Mediterranean, and record numbers of unaccompanied children point to a breakdown in the governance and public acceptance of migration,” the memo continues. “This will be amplified as demographic forces, globalization, climate change, and conflicts increase migration pressures in the coming decades.”

That memo made three key points: OSF — which doles out millions to left-wing causes — has been successful at influencing global immigration policy; Europe’s refugee crisis presents “new opportunities” for the organization to influence global immigration policy; and the refugee crisis is the “new normal.”

Being an Ideologue Means Never Having to Say You’re Wrong … “Communism would have worked, if the Soviet Union had only tried it for real.” … For any political-economic ideology, there is always a hard core of believers who will never waver in their conviction that if only the program were tried in its pure form, it would succeed. Any failures — even debacles on a grand scale, including the fiasco of 20th century communism — will be chalked up to ideological impurity and improper application.- Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s Noah Smith, the site’s most provocative and often wrongheaded columnist compares communism to free-markets in this editorial. His conclusion: “Hard core believers” of any type are probably wrong.

We don’t think so.

Communism in its modern form is a pervasively authoritarian ideology. Its corollary is state control. Free-market economics is exactly the opposite. It is most effective when the state is at least dormant.

Can societies ever be too free? That’s hard to fathom. Certainly – and sadly – that doesn’t seem to be a problem in the world today. Nonetheless, Noah pursues his points.

In reality, true believers often cling tenaciously to their worldviews … [But] the tendency toward ideological commitment is now being tested in the U.S., as free-market dogma — sometimes known as neo-liberalism — is coming under increasing attack.

Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign gained a surprising amount of support from young people. Economists, both in the public eye and out of it, are focusing more on inequality and embracing a more activist role for the state.

Business professors are starting to question the short-termism of financial markets and shareholder control. Some researchers at right-leaning think tanks are saying that Republicans need to move away from Reaganomics and its mix of tax cuts and deregulation.

In fact we don’t recognize what Smith calls “free-market dogma.” What the US has in place now is what we’ve called technocratic fascism.

To conflate it with a pure form of anarcho-capitalism is ludicrous.

The US government runs on well over $3 trillion a year. It pursues bloodthirsty hegemony abroad and repression at home.

The dominant ideology of the US – and the West in general – is corporatism. And corporatism is the result of Supreme Court decisions that have at least partially created a reign of judicial terror that includes intellectual property rights, corporate personhood and monopoly central banking.

Absent these three disastrous influences, the US probably would look a lot more like it did before the Civil War, when the country – despite slavery and genocidal policies toward Native Americans – produced something of a golden epoch in the annals of industrial freedom and creativity.

The success of this era, ironically, laid the building blocks for the current American empire. Pre-Civil War, creativity was fairly untrammeled by government regulations and entrepreneurship was not constrained by the current faux fervor of environmentalism.

The antebellum era was a time not only of profound political change but also of great technological and economic innovation. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Europe in the 1700s, had produced new inventions and methods of production.

American inventors transformed the U.S. economy with new innovations of their own. This rapid development of manufacturing and improved farming had such a profound effect on American society that historians often refer to it as the Market Revolution.

Some antebellum inventions? The cotton gin, the steamboat, the Erie Canal and railroads.

The building blocks of modernity not just for the US but for the world were put in place during a period of incandescent creativity. People could invent what they wanted and put their ideas into production.

Contrast this with communism. From what we can tell, Stalin’s number one product was genocide. Certainly, people abandoned communism as soon as they could. The system was only kept in place by force.

Contrast that to the US, where it took a war – the Civil War – to change the texture of society and replace laissez-faire with the beginnings of the technocratic capitalism that the US is sinking under today.

Smith writes in his conclusion that people generally are not ideological. The implication is that free-market “neoliberalism” has moved in an overly energetic fashion in the direction of industrial anarchy.

But as explained above, laissez-faire has been retreating in the US for well over a century-and-a-half now. Smith seems to be confusing fascism with freedom.

Nonetheless, he is fairly certain what’s coming next:

“I expect the U.S. public to cast around for alternatives to the neoliberalism of Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush … Some sort of course change, rather than a doubling down, seems inevitable.”

Leave aside our disagreement with his characterization of the philosophies of these three men, it is hard to conceive of a society failing from too much entrepreneurship, industrial vitality and freedom.

On the other hand, it equally hard to visualize a successful society shaped by the brutal intolerance of communism – as it apparently evolves inevitably when it is tried.

Conclusion: One can never have too much freedom, in our view. And one can never have too little forcible communism. Human action is preferable to authoritarianism. Societies work best when people (absent sociopaths) are left to their own devices.

OLDDOGS COMMENTS!

Please let me add to this article with some comments about the people’s responsibility. Even with the massive propaganda we have been submitted to starting in kinder-garden and all the way through collage, the media industry the schools and the Governments excessive compulsive passing of more and more statutes should have rang an alarm bell in the peoples mind many years ago. This present social ignorance shows just how successful they have been at forming an acceptance in the people of being manipulated into compliance. So where the hell was their common sense all these years and why are they still voting? You have to be a brain dead jackass to support a democratic form of government when diversity is an accepted social commitment.

Russia leaves the Dollar based monetary system and adopts a system of Sovereign Currency. The implications are phenomenal! “In 1990 the first priority of Washington and the IMF was to pressure Yeltsin and the Duma to “privatize” the State Bank of Russia, under a Constitutional amendment that mandated the new Central Bank of Russia, like the Federal Reserve or European Central Bank, be a purely monetarist entity whose only mandate is to control inflation and stabilize the Ruble. In effect, money creation in Russia was removed from state sovereignty and tied to the US dollar.”

2016: “The Stolypin club report advises to increase the investment, pumping up the economy with money from the state budget and by the issue of the Bank of Russia”. Putin decided to follow the Stolypin club advice as the new monetary policy of the country. -Before It’s News

Money is changing fast and the US dollar is going to crash.

Here’s an excerpt from yet another recently published article (translated from the Russian) describing how the ruble may now evolve (here).

We must nationalize the ruble. What does it mean? It means that we must separate the internal markets from the external ones.

… Thus, the first step for Russia is secession from the IMF and others similar institutions designed to keep the entire world in bondage. The dollar noose must be cut.

Now the amount of printed rubles will not be determined by how many dollars we have but by the actual needs of our economy.

… We have absolutely no need in the central bank in its current form, but we do need a financial regular. Under any regime, it was the Treasury that performed this function. Let it remain the same now regardless of the official name. It may continue to be called the Central Bank. If the essence is changed, there is no need in changing plaques.

You can also see an article (here)that goes into this issue more deeply and claims that Putin has in mind backing a portion of the ruble with gold as well. (We should note there are claims the ruble is backed by gold already.)

The dramatic – historical – Russian currency changes (if these articles are accurate) seem a little difficult to discern in full at this moment, but obviously things are changing fast. And they are changing for China’s “money” as well. In fact, some have speculated China and Russia could launch a joint, gold-backed currency (here, see bottom of article).

At the beginning of October, the yuan joins the IMF’s SDR basket (here). This means that major international institutions can issue bonds payable in yuan (actually RMB, the Chinese external currency).

And that is just what has happened already. The World Bank is issuing a large yuan/RMB tranche and this will be the first of many (here).

Investors who want to place funds in RMB rather than dollars will use the new yuan/RMB-based instruments. The US will continue to print dollars but those dollars may not find a home abroad so easily. Instead they may circulate back into the US economy creating significant price inflation.

The US was able to do so much damage domestically and abroad because of its virtually unlimited spending power. It’s been able to prosecute endless, horrible wars and imprison up to five percent of its adult population at any one time.

Now things are changing. Between the Russian announcement and yuan/RMB convertibility, the US will gradually have more trouble printing money at will. Perhaps the corrupt military-industrial complex will be impelled to shrink and large-scale social programs like the wretched Obamacare will have more difficulty with funding as well.

As a libertarian publication, we should rejoice over the upcoming starvation of the US fedgov.

But we will not. We are well aware that the same banking influences that created the monstrous, modern state is ruining US and the West generally in order to build up a more febrile internationalism.

The BRICs, invented by Goldman Sachs are part of it. So is this reconfiguration of reserve currencies.

It seems natural, of course, as “directed history”always does. But it is not natural in the slightest. From what we can tell, it is pre-planned.

Remember both the IMF and the World Bank are controlled by the US. And yet it is these two organizations that are facilitating the rise of the yuan/RMB.

Also, please pay attention to how Russia will issue rubles into the economic system (from the same translated article we quoted previously):

How can we calculate [how many rubles Russia needs]? In exactly the same way as the United States calculates the amount of dollars needed for its economy. Just as the European Union does the same.

The best justification would be that from now on Russia issues rubles based on the value (in rubles) of all natural resources explored on its territory. It is quite amusing that subsequent steps are no rocket science; they are dictated by common sense itself. Since we are breaking down the disadvantageous system,

Putin may be taking a big step, but by circumventing his central bank (initially imposed by the West) he can be seen as moving toward more state control of Russian currency.

And for years, we have debated heatedly with people like Ellen Brown (here) who believe that federal governments can do a much better job of printing money than quasi-independent central banks.

Good Lord! What’s wrong with a little monetary freedom?

All Putin has to do if he wants a healthy currency is declare that the new ruble will be backed by gold and that its issuance will be a private or regional matter.

Let a thousand gold mines bloom. Let the circulation of gold and its related paper notes travel up or down depending on quantity and demand – not the determinations of yet another shadowy, elite clique.

This is the way the US ran before the Civil War and created one of the world’s most prosperous and freest cultures. Those in the US live yet on the dregs of that “golden” period.

But this is not well understood. As time goes on the often-illiterate alternative media may join in hosannas for Putin’s upcoming currency shift. But, again, just because “Russia” will now control its currency instead of a central bank reporting to the IMF, doesn’t necessarily create a better system.

Of course, the argument will be made this sort of system is what Hitler installed in Nazi Germany in order to create the German “miracle” of the 1930s (which we are supposedly not able to talk about). But that system might have destroyed itself over time. Surely it would have.

To begin with, such systems may work very well. But since the “money” is being created by human deciders rather than the competitive market, distortions are inevitable. Price-fixing, which is what it is, never works.

And while we are making the point that this newfound ruble freedom may not be so profound as advertised, let us note that the advent of a currency war is being accompanied by military tension as well.

Conclusion: Whether such tensions are legitimate or dramatized is difficult to say. But given elite banking control of so much around the world, we would not be surprised if we are simply being exposed to a gigantic performance of sorts directed from the top down. Ironically, despite apparent “setbacks,” London’s City surely leads the way.

There is an interesting disconnect with some people when discussing the concept of global centralization. Naturally, the mind reels in horror at the very idea, because many of us know, deep down at our core, that centralization is the root of tyranny. We know that when absolute power is granted into the hands of an elite few over the lives of the masses, very bad things happen. No small group of people has ever shown itself trustworthy, rational, empathic or wise enough to handle such a responsibility. They ALWAYS screw it up, or, they deliberately take advantage of their extreme position of influence to force a particular ideology on everyone else.

This leads to resistance, resistance leads to sociopolitical crackdown and then great numbers of people are imprisoned, enslaved or even murdered. This leads to even more resistance until one of two possible outcomes emerges — chaos and revolution or complete totalitarianism and micro-managed collectivism.

There is no way around this eventual conflict. As long as the centralists continue to pursue total power, men and women will gather to fight them and the situation will escalate. The only conceivable way that this fight could be defused is if the elites stop doing what they do. If they suddenly become enlightened and realize the error of their ways, then perhaps we could escape the troubles unscathed. Or, if those same elites all happen to meet an abrupt end and their influence is neutralized, then the world might have a chance to adjust and adapt in a more organic fashion.

Unfortunately, there are people who refuse to believe that a fight is unavoidable. They desperately want to believe there is another way, and they will engage in an amazing display of mental gymnastics in order to justify this belief.

First, I think it is important to note that I have always argued that the globalists will eventually fail in their pursuit. I find that some folks out there misinterpret my position when I outline the strategies of globalists and they assume I am presenting global centralization as a “sine qua non.” I do not argue that the elites will win the fight, I only argue that there is no way to avoid the fight.

The rhetorical question always arises: “How could the globalists ever hope to secure dominance over the entire world; isn’t that an impossible task?”

I believe according to my knowledge of history and human psychology that it IS an impossible task, but that is NOT going to stop the globalists from trying.

This is what the cynics just don’t seem to grasp; we are dealing with a group of narcissistic psychopaths organized around a cult ideology and with nearly unlimited resources at their fingertips. These people think they are rising man-gods, like the Egyptian pharaohs of old. They cannot be persuaded through superior logic or emotional appeal. They will not be deterred by mass activism or peaceful redress. They only understand one thing — the force of arms and the usefulness of lies.

Such people are notorious for taking entire civilizations down with them rather than ceding their thrones. It is foolish to plan a response to them on the assumption that a fight can be avoided. When I say that the globalists are “destined to lose,” this is predicated on my understanding that a certain percentage of human beings will always have an inherent capacity for resistance to tyranny. The globalists will be defeated because there is no way to quantify every single threat to their utopian framework. As long as people continue to fight them, physically and with information, regardless of the personal cost, their weaknesses will be found and they will fall.

This will not be accomplished, however, without considerable sacrifice.

When I talk about “collapse”, I am talking about a process. Collapse is not an singular event, it is an ongoing series of events. The U.S. has, for example, been in the middle of a collapse since 2008. The end of this collapse will come when the final economic bubble propping up our system has burst and the process of rebuilding begins. The most important questions is, WHO will do the rebuilding? The globalists with their power agenda, or common people seeking freedom and prosperity?

I have outlined in numerous articles the reality that an ongoing destabilization of large portions of the global economic framework will be used by the elites as leverage to convince the public that greater centralization is necessary, including global economic management through the IMF and BIS, a global currency using the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights as a bridge and global governance through the United Nations or a similar body not yet developed. This plan is becoming more and more openly discussed by globalists within the mainstream media. It’s hardly a secret anymore.

Many people will undoubtedly support this centralization out of fear of instability. That said, many people will also refuse to support it.

Here is how I believe, according to historical precedence and the globalist’s own writings, that they will attempt to assert global centralization post-collapse and enforce compliance.

Resource Management And Distribution

As I point out in many of my articles on the necessity for localism, without ample food, water and shelter self-maintained by groups of like minded citizens, no resistance can be mounted against a centralizing force. If you cannot supply your own logistics, then you must resort to stealing them from the enemy. Obviously, it is less risky to supply yourself if possible.

Post-collapse, when rule of law in many places has broken down and resources can no longer be transferred safely from region to region, the name of the game will be control of necessities and the producers of necessities. This is also used by totalitarians when the danger of unrest is present. A prime example of this method in action was the Stalinist consolidation of the Soviet Union.

The fact is, successful rebellions in occupied nations tend to grow in rural surroundings. Cities are often strongholds for totalitarians because they offer more means of surveillance, a more passive population and, once taken over, they are easier to secure and defend. I call this the “green zone doctrine;” the use of locked down cities as pivot points to launch attacks on rural people.

Stalin used this very model, sending troops from controlled cities to plunder resources from outlying farming communities. He then stored these supplies for “redistribution;” the people deemed most useful to the regime were fed, the people deemed not useful or potential threats were not fed. In the end, Stalin killed off many potential rebels simply by denying them food production or food access.

The elites do not need to own every inch of ground in order to launch an effective campaign of martial law. All they need to do is own key cities through surveillance technology and troop presence, then use these cities as staging grounds to confiscate resources in surrounding areas from people they do not like. If you think the government would not pursue that kind of tactic in the U.S., I highly suggest you look into Executive Order 13603, signed by Barack Obama in 2012. This order gives the president authority during a “national emergency” to take any private property or resources if it is deemed “necessary to national defense.”

It should be noted that starvation as a weapon has been extremely useful for the elites in the past.

The Malaysian Model Of Control

If the elites are anything, they are rather predictable. This is because they have a habit of consistently using strategies that have worked for them before. In my article When The Elites Wage War On America, This Is How They Will Do It, I examine the writings of Council On Foreign Relations member Max Boot on methods for quelling insurgencies. In the U.S., insurgency is a given post-collapse. The only question is whether it will be a large insurgency or a small one.

I do not hold out much hope for most of the rest of the world in terms of generating a useful rebellion. Most citizens in Europe and Asia are unarmed and untrained. Any resistance in these regions will be very small and cell structured if it is going to survive.

The methods Max Boot describes tend toward larger threats to the establishment. Boot mentions specifically the great success by the British in Malaysia from 1948-1960 against highly effective communist guerillas and terrorists. This success can be attributed to several factors:

1) The British used large-scale concentration camps to separate production centers from rebel influence. These were massive camps surrounded by barbed wire fences and guard towers, primarily used to house farmers and other workers and their families. This stopped the guerillas from hiding among the working class and recruiting from them. This follows the “green zone doctrine” I described above.

2) The British implemented a sophisticated identification system for all Malaysian citizens including fingerprinting. They then set up numerous checkpoints across the country at which citizens had to produce their paperwork. Anyone who did not have their papers was held on suspicion of being an insurgent. The rebels in Malaysia attempted to counter this by forcefully taking over busy buildings and buses, then burning everyone’s IDs. This would not be a very effective tactic in a digitized world where identification is accomplished through advanced biometrics.

3) Instead of fielding massive lumbering military brigades in a useless effort to cover large stretches of ground, the British used spies and informants to locate rebel strongholds, then sent special forces units in to neutralize them. Again, they did not need to control every inch of ground; they used military assets wherever the rebels were, then left. Their goal was not to control a lot of ground, but to kill rebels. The British used considerable brutality in their efforts, including a mobile gallows that traveled the country, and the public display of rotting corpses to strike fear in the insurgency.

4) The political elites in Britain fought the psychological war by offering promises of peace and prosperity to the Malaysian commoners if they supported the effort against the insurgency. They did not necessarily need to follow through on these promises, all they needed to do was create a few examples of reward for cooperation, and sell this to the public in a convincing manner. Once enough of the population was in the hands of the British, the insurgency lost supply resources and also had to worry about informants.

Technology Grid For Tyranny

Malaysia was an example of a competent strategy to uproot insurgents, but there were also many failures and pitfalls. The elites are trying to mitigate any future unknown quantities when fighting against rebellions through the use of new technologies.

The green zone doctrine could only be successful today with the use of biometric surveillance. Restriction of movement could be accomplished, but only in cities with extensive surveillance grids. The insurgents of a post-collapse future would be hard pressed to infiltrate or exfiltrate from a green zone with currently available facial recognition, gait and walk recognition, retina and thumbprint scanning, etc. Facial recognition has even gone into the realm of thermal imaging; cameras can use the unique heat signature from blood vessels within the human face to identify a person from a relative distance. Make-up and prosthetics would not counter this. Thermal masking would be the only solution.

Beyond that, an insurgency would have to be technologically savvy. Cyber warfare would have to be integral to their methodology. This is not something any other rebellion in history has had to deal with.

An Uneducated And Bumbling Insurgency

The globalist’s strategy to trigger economic and social chaos, then lock down certain regions and offer centralization as a solution to the population, is far easier to accomplish when the opposition they face lacks insight, patience, planning and initiative.

The British were partially successful in Malaysia because the guerillas were ignorant of public perception. While they were effective and ruthless fighters, their viciousness resulted in lack of public support. Though wide public support is not needed for victory, it certainly helps.

Multiple revolutions against Stalin’s power, some of them very large, were put down because of poor planning. Rebels massed sizable forces in tight areas, such as a single mountain or mountain ranges. Stalin simply dropped poisonous gasses on insurgents that had put all their eggs in one basket and forgot to stockpile gas masks. It is vital to recognize that in a post-collapse world governments and elites may no longer be subject to public scrutiny, and are thus free to act as maliciously as they want. All contingencies have to be considered.

Rebels in the Soviet Union also had a bad habit of ignoring logistics. Many were armed with mismatched rifles and a rainbow selection of ammunition instead of arming all their men with the same rifle and the same ammo for redundancy. Rebellions have been lost in the past merely because the fighters armed with too wide an array of weapons ran out of enough ammo to feed any of them.

Insurgents have also historically suffered from an inability to strike the leadership centers of the empires they fought. Primarily because they did not know who the real leadership was. Only in our modern era do we have the information available to identify the elites and their organizations. Globalists are often very vocal today in media about who they are and what they want. This is why the elites seek to make the next insurgency the LAST insurgency. Never before have they been so vulnerable.

I believe the globalists will use their standard strategy of disinformation and division first to acquire centralization, but eventually they will turn to a Stalin/Malaysian model for control on the ground. I will have to save the specific counter-strategies to these tactics for another article. Some of them I probably cannot legally discuss at all. The most important thing to remember, though, is that the globalists’ job is harder than our job. They have to control people, property, resources, and mass psychology. They have thousands of variables to take into account, and thousands of situations that could go wrong.

All we have to worry about is our own local organization, our own moral compass, our own survival and removing the top globalists from the picture.

Comments Off on How The Globalists Will Attempt To Control Populations Post Collapse

“Slowly, every police department in the United States, at the behest of the Department of Homeland Security [DHS], is being trained by Israeli groups. As part of this training, there is an increased move to use of military uniforms, armored vehicles, heavy weapons, illegal surveillance, lying to the people, press and courts and systematic interference in the electoral system…”

If this seems hocus pocus, hang in there. Listen to the Boston Globe back in 2011:

“Police chiefs from Newton, Framingham, and Belmont headed off last weekend for a weeklong counterterrorism seminar in Israel, funded by the Anti-Defamation League. They are joining a dozen other senior law enforcement officials from the Northeast to network and get first-hand advice from Israeli security experts.”

The Jerusalem Post confirmed the report.[2] JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, admitted in the same year that

We are also told that the Israeli army “trained London Police in tactics and strategy during Gaza crisis” in 2014.

Even during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, Max Blumenthal himself admitted that the US police force and other officials were trained in Israel. Blumenthal called the plan the “Israelification of America.”

“With the United States on constant terror alert since the events of September 11, 2001, American police and law enforcement officials are taking advantage of Israel’s expertise in various facets of counter-terrorism and first response to better protect the American people.

“In 2002, Los Angeles Police Department detective Ralph Morten visited Israel to receive training and advice on preparing security arrangements for large public gatherings. From lessons learned on his trip, Det. Morten prepared a new Homicide Bomber Prevention Protocol and was better able to secure the Academy Awards presentation.

“In January 2003, thirty-three senior U.S. law enforcement officials – from Washington, Chicago, Kansas City, Boston and Philadelphia – traveled to Israel to attend a meeting on “Law Enforcement in the Era of Global Terror.” The workshops helped build skills in identifying terrorist cells, enlisting public support for the fight against terrorism and coping with the aftermath of a terrorist attack…

“In September 2013, a special team of bomb squad members from cities along the U.S.-Mexico border travelled to Israel in an effort to improve techniques and tactics for dealing with illegal immigration and IED attacks.”

Obviously we have a situation here. We all know by now that Israel has spread covert and terrorist activities in much of the West and the Middle East. For example, the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was a member of a terrorist organization called the Stern Gang that led to the assassination of British Resident Minister in the Middle East Lord Moyne in August 1944.[7]

The fundamental question is this: Why have our domestic police departments been brainwashed in Israel? Didn’t Abu Ghraib teach us anything? Didn’t British journalist Robert Fisk write that “Abu Ghraib torture trail leads to Israel”?Did anyone enjoy sodomy at that place? How about raping boys in the same madhouse in front of their mothers? How about “a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engag[ing] in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms”?

If those acts were morally repugnant, why again are we sending elected officials to be trained in a foreign land which has caused nothing but misery in the United States? More importantly, how would the Founding Fathers of America respond to this pernicious enterprise? Didn’t they unanimously declare that America should never be involved in foreign entanglements?

“Brother Netanyahu, thank you so much for treading on my terrorist work.”

After more than three years of political manipulation and covert warfare, what has been the result of all the training in Israel? Peace and harmony? Or chaos in major centers in America? What do we see in places like Dallas, Ferguson, Baltimore, etc.? Isn’t the Israeli regime actually killing two birds with one stone here? Aren’t they dividing and subjugating people in America through covert means? Aren’t they implicitly repeating what people like Louis Wirth did in major cities in America?

If pawns and thugs in the BLM movement suddenly realize that they are being manipulated, if all decent Americans find out that the police force and US officials were trained in Israel, there would be anger in America. And that anger obviously has the potential to produce unwanted and ugly consequences, such as violent reactions.

We are not proposing violent reactions. What we are proposing is the antithesis of violence. Our view is that the US and Israeli governments must act according to reason and the moral law and political order, not according to the dictates of essentially Talmudic dogmas,[ which are essentially anti-Logos and anti-Western.

If they cannot do that, then they have to know that they cannot fool the masses forever. Once the masses suddenly wake up from their dogmatic slumber, violent reaction will inevitably ensue, and we all hope and pray that it doesn’t come to that pivotal point.

We have seen how similar events have played out in history, most specifically during the Hep-Hep riots in 1819 in Germany. Once the mob and much of the middle class realized that they were economically being reduced to rubble and abject poverty through cheating and vices, and once they stumbled upon the real perpetrators, chaos loomed. E. Michael Jones writes,

“Police officers were beaten and thrown to the ground and a military unit which the police called for help was met with a hail of rocks. Ten of the rioters were arrested, and six of them held in jail. The mob then attacked the house of Theresie Huegelin, where the Jew Abraham Loeb Brueckner ran a junk shop.

“After breaking down the door of Brueckner’s shop, the mob smashed the store windows, as well as the windows on the second floor of the building. During the rioting, one of the protesters insulted the royal city commissioner by shouting ‘Hep-Hep’ in his face, and then laughing shouted tauntingly ‘arrest me’…

“The tumult grew so large on August 4 that the president of the council was forced to call in reinforcements. Signs of Jewish businesses were ripped down and trampled on. Finally, the rioters invaded the house of Moises Forchheimer. Forchheimer was not at home at the time, but his wife, who was, was forced to pay the rioters 60 pennies to get rid of them…

“Of the 16 men arrested for rioting in Frankfurt, 15 had either already declared bankruptcy or they were unemployed former soldiers, day laborers or street urchins, a group of people, in other words, who in the best of times were at the periphery of the economy and were being pushed into penury by the influx the lower class Jews who undercut their tenuous connection to the local economy.”

One of the main reasons for the Hep-Hep riot again was that the Jewish oligarchs began to cheat the system and sucked the blood out of the middle class. This was never an isolated case. Centuries earlier, we find the same phenomenon in Poland, most particularly during the 1600s. Jewish historiographer Heinrich Graetz declared that once the Jews began to immerse themselves in the study of the Talmud, wickedness again became the rule:

“A love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision, constituted the character of the Polish Jews. Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral sense…Integrity and right-mindedness they had lost as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth.

“The vulgar acquired the quibbling method of the schools, and employed it to outwit the less cunning. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating against members of their own race; cunning could not well be employed, because they were sharp-witted; but the non-Jewish world with which they came into contact experienced to its disadvantage the superiority of the Talmudical spirit of the Polish Jews.”

This energized an anti-Jewish spirit among the Poles, for they knew that they were being cheated. This quickly led to violence among the Gentiles, who in 1638 “slew 200 Jews, and destroyed several synagogues.”

Ten years later, Jews clung to the book of Zohar for Messianic revolution, and this again caused “bloody retribution,” during which Jews were slain.

Within the next three years, anti-Jewish resistance led again to a bloody war that took the lives of thousands of Jews, and caused many others to move to places like the Netherlands, Bohemia, Austria, Italy, and Hungary.

Wherever they went, however, they took the study of the Talmud with them, bearing the same attitudes towards Gentiles. “Far from giving up their own method in a foreign country,” Graetz said, “they demanded that all the world should be regulated by them, and they gained their point.”

In the same century, capitalism fell in the hands of the Jews. French historian Fernand Braudel called this “the ‘age’ of great Jewish merchants,” during which they were involved in “lucrative areas of commerce” such as piracy

“in which these Jewish merchants specialized. Questions of morality did not apply…Jewish merchants were the brains behind the brawn—financing, advising, and sometimes leading the Caribbean’s emerging fighting force: a ragtag crew of misfits of every nation that coalesced as the dreaded pirates of the Spanish Main.”[18]

Eventually in the 1660s, “the pirate capital acquired a reputation as the world’s ‘wickedest city.’”

We want neither “the world’s wickedest city” nor violent reactions. The best way to avoid both detrimental acts is for the Powers That Be to submit their will to reason and abandon their covert and subversive activities. In other words, we are proposing a return to Logos.

This is actually a modus vivendi because Logos is what unites us all as human beings. In addition, since we are all creatures of Logos, then to act against reason and the moral universe is detrimental and therefore dangerous. As Israeli historians such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe and Zeev Sternhell have shown, the Israeli regime has been acting against reason since 1948, and it is irresponsible to allow the US police force to be trained in that region of the world.

What we can say is that decent police officers probably have no clue of what’s going on. They do not know that they are being manipulated. But one thing is for sure: the violent events we saw in Ferguson and more recently in Dallas actually distract people from focusing on the Israeli occupation, concentration camps in Gaza, and perpetual wars in the Middle East. What’s your assessment, Mark Dankof?

Mark Dankof: Jonas, I believe your overview of the nature of the problem of the increasing involvement of Israel in training domestic American police departments mirrors the dangers of Israeli involvement with the American National Security Establishment and its sixteen (16) agencies. Your overview, and the recent work of Dr. E. Michael Jones of Culture Wars in discussing the Jewish infiltration of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, provide a wealth of information on just how serious the implications of all of this are for the people of the United States.

It is noteworthy that the Mainstream Media (MSM) consortiums are discussing none of these developments. This is not accidental. Your work, that of Dr. Jones, and sources like Dr. Paul Craig Roberts and Dr. Philip Giraldi, ex-CIA Station Chief and Israeli critic at the Council for the National Interest, should cause every American of any political spectrum or skin hue to lose much sleep late at night.

In recent years, I have been sounding the alarm on this through my radio shows, TV guest appearances, and articles. I have urged Americans to consider the real track record of the Zionist State of Israel vis a vis the United States over many decades.

after the death of Kennedy; the USS Liberty affair in 1967; the Jonathan Pollard spy case;

the PROMIS affair; Israel’s involvement in 9-11; the Rosen-Weissman AIPAC spy case and the tampering with that court case undertaken by then Congresswoman Jane Harman of California at the behest of Israeli intelligence, proven by an NSA wiretap and intercept; the Ben Ami Kadesh spy case;

which has resulted in both the illegal assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in Iran at the behest of Israel (along with many other criminal acts over the years), and the bribing of key Zionist and Neo-Conservative tools in the American government to achieve the removal of the MEK from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations.

Now we add to all of this the clear record of the State of Israel in direct involvement in ethnic cleansing in Palestine, Gaza, and the Sabra and Shatila murders in southern Lebanon among the laundry list of criminal acts since the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, and the lunacy of facilitating the Zionist State’s involvement in training domestic American police departments comes into absolute focus.

I have just finished Taleeb Starkes’ fine perspective on

“Arguments Against the Race Grievance Mafia” for VT. Much of what he says I agree with. To that, I’d add that Dr. E. Michael Jones’ perspective on Ferguson and Black Lives Matter for Culture Wars and two You Tube videos would be essential additional ingredients in adding to Taleeb’s legitimate points and concerns. The Jones’ discussions on line may be accessed

At the end of the day after ruminating about these matters and the implications, I conclude the following: 1) Jewish and Zionist manipulation of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, the recent tragedies like Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter phenomenon, and the skillful employment of their control of Mainstream Media (MSM) consortiums to do it, has an agenda attached to it.

That agenda involves pitting unsuspecting African-Americans and European-Americans against each other while both factions ignore how this Fifth Column has pitted them against each other to facilitate Jewish Talmudic Supremacy in the United States and the latter’s hijacking of our Federal Government, our Central Banking System, our Foreign Policy, our Educational Institutions, our NGOs, our Mainstream Media (MSM), and last-but-not-least our degenerate culture courtesy of the Frankfurt School and its Institute of Social Research.

All of this is to the absolute detriment of both African Americans and European Americans once both greatly influenced by Christianity in American culture and life. The increasing absence of the latter is evident in the rise of sexual perversion, family disintegration, violence, hatred, race baiting, and scapegoating on both sides.

2) The Israelification of the American domestic police departments is a deliberate continuation and intensification of the

American Domestic Police State since 9-11.

I said this a few years ago for The Oslo Timesand Press TV among many other outlets on many occasions. Take a look at the

Missouri Information Action Center (MIAC) report of 2008 for earlier evidence of where we are heading.

It was proven that year that the Federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS),

the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL), and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), were developing an “American Domestic Terrorist Profile” for the Missouri State Police which stated that a disproportionate number of these dangerous people were believed to be found among many supporters of Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and white males who go to Christian churches while opposing abortion-on-demand, gay marriage, globalist trade treaties, and American membership in NATO.

The report was withdrawn when it came to light. What has not been withdrawn, but increased is the ongoing Israelification of our domestic American police departments, our National Security apparatus, and the Zionist power and financial wherewithal to support subversive movements like Black Lives Matter, for reasons already discussed and chronicled everywhere from

The Endgame is terrifying for all of us. We could be staring a Third World War and the final completion of the Domestic American Police State’s construction right in the face after the next Presidential Inauguration in January of 2017. Let African-Americans and European-Americans of good will recognize what has happened in this country, and band together in an absolutely cemented alliance to stop it. Catastrophe is at our very doorstep.

Alexis: Great assessment again, Mark. The good news for us is that, catastrophe or not, reason or Logos will triumph in the end. And because we are not blind to higher realities and metaphysics, because we submit our will to what Kant calls practical reason, the current regime is scared of people like us—and they should.

The god of the current regime is unbridled passion and appetite, lust, and ultimately Mammon. We are proposing the antithesis of all this. They will never like people like us, for we will continue to expose them for what they really are.

Moreover, if The Lord of the Rings teaches us anything, it is that patience is an ethical medicine. Frodo quickly began to panic as soon as he realized that Gollum was a cunning creature that deserved to die.

Frodo came to that conclusion because he was frightened. He thought that a small creature like Gollum could alter what Hegel calls the “ultimate design…whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason.”[23]

What Frodo didn’t realize was that Gollum was inexorably fulfilling what Hegel termed “the cunning of reason.” “I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum,” said Frodo. “For now I am really afraid. What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance…”

For Frodo, the death of Gollum would have been the end of his pain. Gandalf, being wiser than the lad who obviously could not see beyond the physical world, corrected Frodo and responded:

“Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.” Gandalf accepted Frodo’s argument

that Gollum deserved to die, but added:

“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise cannot see all ends… There was more than one power at work, Frodo…It was the strangest event in the whole history of the Ring so far: Bilbo’s arrival just at the time, and putting his hand on it, blindly, in the dark…

“It had slipped from Isildur’s hand and betrayed him; then when a chance came it caught poor Deagol, and he was murdered; and after that Gollum, and it had devoured him. It could make no further use of him: he was too small and mean…[then] it abandoned Gollum. Only to be picked up by the most unlikely person imaginable: Bilbo from the Shire!

“Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.

Frodo could not fully grasp Gandalf’s point—until, at last, the Ring was gone and the enemy was completely destroyed. It was destroyed not on Frodo’s terms, but in the fullness of time. Frodo obviously realized that if he had to play by the rule, he had to be patient and apply wisdom.

The lesson for us here is that there are indeed powers that are beyond man’s reason and intellect in this world, but Logos will never act in a way that will contradict reason and intellect. This is why we can say with certainty that a movement that acts against reason is anti-Logos and therefore anti-humanity. That movement, as Hegel and Solzhenitsyn perceived, will be destroyed at the end of all things. This means that truth or Logos will prevail.

That indeed is an encouraging thought. But the simple question that every decent and reasonable person must answer is this: Do we have the moral and intellectual courage to follow the truth or Logos? As Solzhenitsyn put it,

“Let each man choose: will he remain a witting servant of the lies, or has the time come for him to stand straight

as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?”

[20] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vantage Books, 1999 and 2001); Ilan Pappe, The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: One World, 2006); Zeev Sternhell, The Founding Myths of Israel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Bowyer J. Bell, Terror out of Zion : Irgun Zvai Leumi, LEHI, and the Palestine underground, 1929-1949 (Dublin: Academy Press, 1979).

[21] For recent developments, see “Innocent civilians continue to die in U.S. drone strikes in Yemen,” Xinhua (China), July 15, 2016.

[22] For historical sources, see William Roger Louis, The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945-1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

[23] George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 28.

Our country and perhaps the entire world is doomed because the overwhelming majority of people have lost their ability to think cognitively instead of basing their strongly held convictions on emotionalism. Most people on this planet are more fearful than knowledgeable. The sheer lack of knowledge concerning human behavior is overwhelming. Could it be this fear and lack of historical knowledge has created an environment in which freedom and liberty cannot possibly exist?

Shortly before the November election of 2014, a poll was taken concerning the confidence of the people of this country in their members of Congress. Only 11% of the people expressed confidence in the ability of Congress to do their jobs, yet, in that year’s congressional election over 96% of congressional incumbents were reelected. The only way this can be explained is in most areas of this country Americans are fine with the crook they know, it’s just everyone else’s crook who should not be elected.

So, should the average American voter be in fear of Congress? After all, it’s just 535 people on their team and over 300 million people they supposedly represent, the majority of which does not trust them. Does the mere thought or image of Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Chuckie Schumer, Tammy Baldwin, Jared Polis, and David Cicilline strike fear into the hearts of mortal men?

Each and every elected official and most of those appointed to government bureaucratic positions take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. Ostensibly, the Constitution should be the prime directive for all of those who take this oath. Unfortunately for freedom and liberty, our members of Congress do not regularly follow their oaths to uphold and defend. As a matter of fact, of all 535 members of the House of Representatives and US Senate, less than one percent (.0693%) of these members vote in support of their sacred oath at least 70% of the time. 46% of the members of Congress vote constitutionally just over 50% of the time while a whopping 32% vote with our Constitution less than 25% of the time.

For the record, Hillary Clinton’s VP running mate, Tim Kaine, as a member of Congress, voted constitutionally only 1% of the time, yet her campaign, via CNN, has voiced concerns that a Trump presidency will destroy the Constitution.

Considering the above, I believe it would be logical to state less than half of the laws passed by our Congress are constitutional in nature. Perhaps this is why we fear these people; because they have the ability to destroy our individual freedoms, but they do not have within themselves the ability to force compliance with those unconstitutional mandates. That is where the people with uniforms and badges come into play. As paradoxical as it appears, most Americans fear those who pass unconstitutional pieces of legislation but worship at the feet of those who have/will enforce those unconstitutional laws.

And, if you believe for a millisecond that cops and soldiers will not come to your door to seize constitutionally owned firearms if ordered to do so by those who refuse to abide by their own sacred oaths, you are ignorant/delusional beyond comprehension or help.

Pursuing the same points, there appear to be tens of millions of people who are petrified of the thought that Hillary might become our next president. Why should anyone fear a 69-year-old crime family moll who needs help walking up stairs, has obvious seizures and is otherwise mentally deranged?

If we had a constitutionally operating government, Hillary could do little to nothing criminal or tyrannical, even if elected, because she would be surrounded by those who hold that document to be important enough to follow it unconditionally despite threats or promises of financial gain.

A good case can be made that considering the absolute criminal nature of our present government, Hillary Clinton is by far the most qualified candidate to run such a criminal enterprise as criminal-in-chief. Many people fear what Hillary will do with the current powers of the office of president of this country, but almost all of those unconstitutional powers have been accumulated in that office many years prior because the voters of this country were OK with creating a political criminal enterprise as long as that enterprise was run by a candidate of the party of their choosing.

Voters–stand and behold the criminal enterprise of your creation which was constructed under the two major political party paradigm and the millions who have for decades rationalized away voting for the lesser of evils. A constitutional form of government is incompatible with any level of evil; to expect a different outcome is to be delusional or psychopathic.

Millions of gun owners fear that Hillary might be able to push through draconian, unconstitutional gun confiscation either through our corrupt congress or perhaps through executive order. I state again: if Hillary were to do so, neither she nor members of congress or the Supreme Court will be coming to your door to demand you surrender these firearms. No, she and Congress will send the standing armies our anti-Federalist ancestors warned us about and they will strongly resemble those who went door-to-door in New Orleans after Katrina and Boston after the bombing. Will you still be licking their boots and making excuses for their unconstitutional behavior as they terrorize your family and neighbors and carry off your legally owned firearms? What happens to you and your family if you refuse to comply?

The police are all too happy to remind you that you have no right to resist an unconstitutional act performed by a government employee in uniform. Actually, you do–but don’t forget how many times you voted for the unconstitutional lesser of two evils which has delivered as advertised, obscuring this constitutional right. Your votes have eliminated “the law of nature and nature’s God (Common law) as contained in the Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights and replaced it with the laws of the international banking cartel.

“nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” ~ 5th Amendment.

Everything you see happening in this country today that brings fear to your heart was brought about by voting for candidates who would or had violated their sacred oath. Now, that you have repeatedly voted for evil of the lesser variety, please stop complaining about having to live with an evil enterprise of your own creation.

The one issue that continues to confound me is how so many Americans who claim to support our Constitution and Bill of Rights continue to stand in awe of those who make up the standing army. How can a member of Congress who writes or votes for unconstitutional, therefore illegal legislation, a president who signs this illegal act into law or a clown in a black gown who says that law is legal because of precedent be held in such foul regard but the person who enforces that illegal legislation is deemed a hero?

9/11 and its implausible cause, as explained by these people we do not trust, was the showpiece that completely destroyed the mirage of constitutional governance in this country. Shortly after the mass murder that was 9/11, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Homeland Security (an integral part of our standing army) Michael Chertoff, a man who is claimed was the author of the Patriot Act and who also holds dual citizenship with Israel, used his position within our standing army to mandate that all American law enforcement personnel be given training by Israeli entities including, of course, Mossad.

Our government, with this training, intended for all US Citizens to become members of an “occupied territory” and not citizens with unalienable rights. The citizens of this country were to be treated as the Palestinians are treated by the Israeli Defense Force and Mossad. Since the implementation of this Mossad backed LEO training, shootings of unarmed civilians in this country have risen by 500%.

Please understand that in no way do I support the movement called “Black Lives Matter” nor do I ignore the stacks of white money behind them. But, one must give the devil his just acclaim. We constantly hear of blacks being the victims of police shootings and the subsequent protests by those within BLM. Whether motivated to attend out of philosophical or moral interests or to receive money promised to protesters on Craigslist, black people assemble nationwide to voice their displeasure with the rapidly increasing number of black people dying, many unarmed, at the hands of members of our standing army.

While it is true that proportionate to population, a higher percentage of blacks are shot by police than are whites, in real numbers, more whites are shot by police than are blacks. Yet, where are the protests by whites? Considering the majority of cop worshipers are of the white persuasion, perhaps they would rather ignore or rationalize away what should be obvious to Ray Charles: we live in a heavily militarized police state where individual, unalienable rights are a thing of the past.

As can be found in the book by Milton Mayer titled “They Thought They Were Free” all too many Americans believe they are free, or at the very least–safe. Like the Germans of the 1930’s and early to mid-1940’s, we are anything but free and Liberty is an illusion.

Summary:

Our government is a completely criminal enterprise as has been seen recently in the ability of Hillary Clinton to avoid criminal prosecution for serious crimes over several decades and the failure of our government to indict members of the standing army who routinely shoot unarmed citizens.

Our government is not constrained by the limits of a Constitution as the great majority of those whose job is to legislate, completely ignore their sacred oaths when it comes to the performance of their jobs.

The law enforcement personnel in this country, at all levels, do “protect and serve” but they only protect and serve the government agencies they represent. The people of this country have all become “perps” and will be treated accordingly, regardless of race. All members of law enforcement have become members of the “standing army” or “federal and state sheriffs” we were warned about consistently by many of our founders. Worship, honor, and refer to them as “heroes” at your peril. They will consistently enforce the unconstitutional laws passed by various legislatures because they see “duty” to the criminal government as a higher calling than their oaths to uphold and defend our unalienable rights. Besides, honoring one’s sacred oath is not a path to success in this standing army.

Black citizens at least have the courage to stand and protest the uncalled for shooting of innocent black folks. Whites routinely ignore the members of their own race who are shot and killed at the hands of members of our standing army. Perhaps the blatant murders of LaVoy Finicum and Jack Yantis by members of the standing army would have received more attention and outrage had Finicum and Yantis been black instead of white? Why are there no activists groups known as “White Lives Matter?” Lavoy Finicum was shot in the back and the evidence of the murder of rancher Jack Yantis is overwhelming but ignored and condoned by the “authorities.” Please take the time to read William Grigg’s excellent work on the murder of Jack Yantis in the link above.

As previously stated, it is more and more obvious our central government is completely criminal in most of its functions, as witnessed by their unconstitutional votes and actions. Therefore, this government will not allow anyone to interfere with their goals or agendas which line their pockets and the pockets of their criminal supporters. It matters not whom you vote for.

This criminal enterprise will do whatever necessary to ensure the continuity of their plans. Simply stated, should Trump be elected, he is acceptable to the criminal cabal that controls this government. More than likely criminals will do what they do best and fix the election in their favor. The evidence of past crimes in this arena is abundant.

Lastly, the criminals will not be denied. Justice cannot triumph in a society where justice is negotiable.

IN RIGHTFUL REBEL LIBERTY

Mike

OLDDOGS COMMENTS!

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Technocracy is a totalitarian system of economic tyranny, run by scientists and engineers, that is being implemented world wide. The most ‘efficient’ means of societal control is not legislative process, it is authoritarian control. This article clearly depicts the radical transformation of law enforcement. ⁃ TN Editor

Any police officer who shoots to kill is playing with fire.

In that split second of deciding whether to shoot and where to aim, that officer has appointed himself judge, jury and executioner over a fellow citizen. And when an officer fires a killing shot at a fellow citizen not once or twice but three and four and five times, he is no longer a guardian of the people but is acting as a paid assassin. In so doing, he has short-circuited a legal system that was long ago established to protect against such abuses by government agents.

These are hard words, I know, but hard times call for straight talking.

We’ve been dancing around the issue of police shootings for too long now, but we’re about to crash headlong into some harsh realities if we don’t do something to ward off disaster.

You’d better get ready.

It’s easy to get outraged when police wrongfully shoot children, old people and unarmed citizens watering their lawns or tending to autistic patients. It’s harder to rouse the public’s ire when the people getting shot and killed by police are suspected of criminal activities or armed with guns and knives. Yet both scenarios should be equally reprehensible to anyone who values human life, due process and the rule of law.

Loreal Tsingine was shot and killed by a police officerafter she approached him holding a small pair of medical scissors. The 27-year-old Native American woman was suspected of shoplifting.

None of these individuals will ever have the chance to stand trial, be found guilty or serve a sentence for their alleged crimes because a police officer—in a split second—had already tried them, found them guilty and sentenced them to death.

In every one of these scenarios, police could have resorted to less lethal tactics.

They could have attempted to de-escalate and defuse the situation.

They could have acted with reason and calculation instead of reacting with a killer instinct.

That police instead chose to fatally resolve these encounters by using their guns on fellow citizens speaks volumes about what is wrong with policing in America today, where police officers are being dressed in the trappings of war, drilled in the deadly art of combat, and trained to look upon “every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.”

On. Aug. 1, 2016, police responded to a call about a possible abduction of a 17-year-old girl. When they confronted the 46-year-old “suspect,” he reportedly “threw a trash can at them and then charged them with a knife.” When he shouted at them to “shoot me,” they evaded him. When they refused to fire their guns, he stabbed himself in the chest. The officers then tasered the man in order to subdue him.

So what’s the difference between the first three scenarios and the last, apart from the lack of overly aggressive policing or trigger-happy officers?

Ultimately, it comes down to training and accountability.

It’s the difference between police officers who rank their personal safety above everyone else’s and police officers who understand that their jobs are to serve and protect. It’s the difference between police trained to shoot to kill and police trained to resolve situations peacefully. Most of all, it’s the difference between police who believe the law is on their side and police who know that they will be held to account for their actions under the same law as everyone else.

Unfortunately, more and more police are being trained to view themselves as distinct from the citizenry, to view their authority as superior to the citizenry, and to view their lives as more precious than those of their citizen counterparts. Instead of being taught to see themselves as mediators and peacemakers whose lethal weapons are to be used as a last resort, they are being drilled into acting like gunmen with killer instincts who shoot to kill rather than merely incapacitate.

We’re approaching a breaking point.

This policing crisis is far more immediate and concerning than the government’s so-called war on terror or drugs.

Those responsible for this policing crisis are none other than the police unions that are helping police officers evade accountability for wrongdoing; the police academies that are teaching police officers that their lives are more valuable than the lives of those they serve; a corporate military sector that is making a killing by selling military-grade weapons, equipment, technology and tactical training to domestic police agencies; a political establishment that is dependent on campaign support and funding from the powerful police unions; and a police state that is transforming police officers into extensions of the military in order to extend its reach and power.

This is no longer a debate over good cops and bad cops.

It’s a tug-of-war between the constitutional republic America’s founders intended and the police state we are fast becoming.

As former Seattle police chief Norm Stamper recognizes, “Policing is broken. Tragically, it has been broken from the very beginning of the institution. It has evolved as a paramilitary, bureaucratic, organizational arrangement that distances police officers from the communities they’ve been sworn to protect and serve. When we have shooting after shooting after shooting that most people would define as at least questionable, it’s time to look, not just at a few bad apples, but the barrel. And I’m convinced that it is the barrel that is rotted.

So how do we fix what’s broken, stop the senseless shootings and bring about lasting reform?

For starters, stop with the scare tactics. In much the same way that American citizens are being cocooned in a climate of fear—fear of terrorism, fear of extremism, fear of each other—by a government that knows exactly which buttons to push in order to gain the public’s cooperation and compliance, police officers are also being indoctrinated with the psychology of fear.

“That isn’t the word used in law enforcement circles, of course,” explains law professor Seth Stoughton. “Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But make no mistake, officers don’t learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant just because it’s fun. They do so because they are afraid. Fear is ubiquitous in law enforcement… officers are constantly barraged with the message that that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it.”

From their earliest days in the academy, would-be officers are told that their prime objective, the proverbial “first rule of law enforcement,” is to go home at the end of every shift. But they are taught that they live in an intensely hostile world. A world that is, quite literally, gunning for them. As early as the first day of the police academy, the dangers officers face are depicted in graphic and heart-wrenching recordings that capture a fallen officer’s last moments. Death, they are told, is constantly a single, small misstep away.

Second, level the playing field. Police are no more or less special than you or me. Their lives are no more valuable than any other citizen’s. Whether or not they wield a gun, police officers are public servants like all other government officials, which means that they work for us. They answer to us. We are their employers. While police are entitled to every protection afforded under the law, the same as any other citizen, they should not be afforded any special privileges. Most Americans, oblivious about their own rights, aren’t even aware that police officers have their own Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, which protects police officers from being subjected to the kinds of debilitating indignities heaped upon the average citizen and grants police officers accused of a crime with special due process rights and privileges not afforded to the average citizen.

Third, require that police officers be trained in non-lethal tactics. According to the New York Times, a survey of 281 police agencies found that the average young officer received 58 hours of firearms training and 49 hours of defensive tactical training, but only eight hours of de-escalation training. In fact, “The training regimens at nearly all of the nation’s police academies continue to emphasize military-style exercises, including significant hours spent practicing drill, formation and saluting.” If police officers are taking classes in how to shoot, maim and kill, shouldn’t they also be required to take part in annual seminars teaching de-escalation techniques and educating them about how to respect their fellow citizens’ constitutional rights, especially under the First and Fourth Amendments?

Congressional legislation has been introduced to require that police officers be trained in non-lethal force, go through crisis intervention training to help them deal with the mentally ill, and use the lowest level of force possible when responding to a threat. Unfortunately, the police unions are powerful and the politicians are greedy, and it remains unlikely that any such legislation will be adopted in a major election year.

Fourth, ditch the quasi-military obsession. Police forces were never intended to be standing armies. Yet with police agencies dressing like the military in camouflage and armor, training with the military, using military weapons, riding around in armored vehicles, recruiting military veterans, and even boasting military titles, one would be hard pressed to distinguish between the two. Still, it’s our job to make sure that we can distinguish between the two, and that means keeping the police in their place as civilians—non-military citizens—who are entrusted with protecting our rights.

Fifth,demilitarize. There are many examples ofcountries where police are not armed and dangerous, and they are no worse off for it. Indeed, their crime rates are low and their police officers are trained to view every citizen as precious. For all of the talk among politicians about gun violence and the need to enact legislation to make it more difficult for Americans to acquire weapons, little is being done to demilitarize and de-weaponize police. Indeed, President Obama is actuallyreconsidering his limited ban on the flow of military gear to police. The problem is not that police are in any greater danger than before. Rather, by dressing as warriors, they are acting like warriors and increasing the danger inherent in every police encounter.

Sixth, do away with the police warrior mindset in favor of a guardian approach. As Stoughton explains, “Counterintuitively, the warrior mentality … makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians.” It also creates avoidable violence by insisting on deference and compliance and “increases the risk that other officers face in other encounters.” The guardian approach, however, “prioritizes service over crimefighting… it instructs officers that their interactions with community members must be more than legally justified, they must also be empowering, fair, respectful, and considerate. The guardian mindset emphasizes communication over commands, cooperation over compliance, and legitimacy over authority. And in the use-of-force context, the Guardian emphasizes patience and restraint over control, stability over action.”

Eighth, stop relying on technology to fix what’s wrong with the country. The body cameras haven’t stopped the police shootings, and they won’t as long the cameras can be turned on and off at will while the footage remains inaccessible to the public. One North Carolina police department is even testing out a pilot machine learning system that “learns to spot risk factors for unprofessional conduct” and then recommend that officer for early intervention. It sounds a lot like a pre-crime program, only aimed at police officers, which sends up its own warning signals.

Ninth, take a deep breath because change takes time.As Stoughton warns, “Earning public trust will take decades and require rethinking how officers are trained as well as the legal and administrative standards used to review police violence. It will require changing the very culture of policing by reaffirming that policing must be done with a community, not to a community.”

Tenth, stop being busybodies and snitches.Overcriminalization has partially fueled the drive to “police” everything from kids walking to the playground alone and backyard chicken coops to front yard vegetable gardens. But let’s start taking some responsibility for our own communities and stop turning every minor incident into a reason to call the police.

Finally, support due process for everyone, not just the people in your circle. Remember that you no longer have to be poor, black or guilty to be treated like a criminal in America. All that is required is that you belong to the suspect class—a.k.a. the citizenry—of the American police state. As a de facto member of this so-called criminal class, every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

You could be the next person who gets shot by a police officer for moving the wrong way during a traffic stop, running the wrong way in the vicinity of a police officer, or defending yourself against a home invasion when thepolice show up at the wrong address in the middle of the night. People have been wrongfully shot and killed for these exact reasons.

So stop judging and start holding your government officials accountable to ensuring that every American is granted due process of law, which means that no one can be deprived of “life, liberty or property” by a government official without certain fair and legal procedures being followed.

There can be no justice in America when Americans are being killed, detained and robbed at gunpoint by government officials on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing.

Unfortunately, Americans have been so propagandized, politicized and polarized that many feel compelled to choose sides between defending the police at all costs or painting them as dangerously out-of-control. Nothing is ever that black and white, but there are a few things that we can be sure of: America is not a battlefield. American citizens are not enemy combatants. And police officers—no matter how courageous—are not soldiers.

Therein lies the problem: we’ve allowed the government to create an alternate reality in which freedom is secondary to security, and the rights of the citizenry are less important than the authority of the government. This way lies madness.

The longer we wait to burst the bubble on this false chimera, the harder it will be to return to a time when police were public servants and freedom actually meant something, and the greater the risks to both police officers and the rest of the citizenry.

Something must be done and soon.

The police state wants the us vs. them dichotomy. It wants us to turn each other in, distrust each other and be at each other’s throats, while it continues amassing power. It wants police officers who act like the military, and citizens who cower in fear. It wants a suspect society. It wants us to play by its rules instead of holding it accountable to the rule of law.

WHAT REAL PATRIOT’S DO

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from his government." -Thomas Paine

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out...without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.” FL. Hamer